Storytime On Olympus
by MusicIsHarmony
Summary: When Percy, Annabeth, and Grover recieve a summons to Olympus, that's not unusual. What's unusual, is they have no clue what they've done this time. Before they even get there though, in the elevator, something strange happens. Percy, Annabeth, and Grover are going to be witnesses to the first story time on Olympus. (Percy/Annabeth and time travel)
1. Prologue

**Alright, here's the newly reworked prologue! **

**Disclaimer: I do not own Percy Jackson and The Olympians. I do, however own anything you don't recognize. **

The door to Cabin 3 flew open. "Percy! Percy? Where are you?" A muffled groan arose from the bed.

"A-a-Annabeth?..."

"Percy, come on, Chiron needs you at the Big House!" Annabeth crossed over to the bunk beds and yanked on the blankets until they flew off, and then ran off. I sat up just in time to see her blonde curls flying up the hill towards the Big House. I groaned to myself. Annabeth and I had been dating for a few weeks now, and apparently that gave her permission to wake me up in the most annoying way possible-pulling off my blankets.

I pulled myself up out of bed, and pulled on jeans and my orange Camp Half-Blood tee-shirt, before I followed Annabeth up the hill. When I arrived, Chiron, Annabeth, and Mr. D were sitting at the card table always present on the porch, but the cards were surprisingly absent.

"Ah, Peter Johnson," said Mr. D. "Good morning, the sun is shining, blah, blah, blah." Chiron shot him a disapproving look. "Oh, alright, alright. Peter Johnson,"

"-Percy Jackson." I cut in. _  
_

"Yes, yes, whatever." Mr. D. replied. "Anyway, you two have been summoned to Olympus. Argus will take you to the Empire State Building, don't get yourselves killed...although that would be nice...and stay out of trouble for once. That's it. Goodbye. You have five minutes before Argus leaves." He conjured a Diet Coke, and gave us a look that clearly said-_this conversation is over._ Annabeth and I walked off the porch and leaned against the railing.

"So, do you have any idea why we are being summoned?" I asked. Annabeth shook her head, her curls bouncing.

"Nope," she said "No idea."_  
_

We walked down to where Argus was waiting, and got in the car. We sat in silence as the car rolled through the countryside and into the city.

At the Empire State Building, well, that's when things started to get a little weird. Argus had dropped us off, and we went inside, prepared to beg, plead, and bribe the man at the desk. But when he saw us he jumped up, ran over to us, and handed Annabeth a little scroll. "A message from the gods." He said. "Don't read it until you're in the elevator."

Well, we thought that was strange, since, after all, we'd be with the gods in less than five minutes. We piled into the elevator, slid the card into the slot, but the button for the 600th floor didn't appear. We were about to climb back out and tell the guy at the desk, when a blue vortex came swirling out of nowhere. It surrounded Annabeth, and I and I got a weird feeling. You know, like when you stick your head out the car window on the freeway, and then you can't breathe? It was like that. When the wind stopped, we were still in the elevator, but the button for the 600th floor had finally appeared. As we climbed farther and farther up, I told Annabeth, "We should read that note. Maybe it'll explain the wind."

Annabeth unfurled the scroll and read.

* * *

_Perseus and Annabeth,_

_There is another prophecy that states:_

**_Two warriors, both leaders, shall go back to the past_**

**_Wisdom and Power shall be united_**

**_Together, they can do what neither could do alone_**

**_Their love shall change the past, present, and future _**

_This prophecy pertains to you. We have sent you back. We need you to help us fix our mistakes, before it's too late._

_~The Gods_

* * *

Annabeth and I just stared at each other. We were in the past, and I had no clue how far back. Just then, the elevator dinged, and announced they had arrived at Olympus. We took deep breaths, and stepped out into a new world-together.

**So, tell me what you think so far. Please PM me with any and all critiques. **

**~MusicIsHarmony**


	2. Chapter 2

**Newly redone Chapter 1! Those of you who were confused, see if this clears things up...**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Percy Jackson.**

We stepped out of the elevator, and immediately Annabeth began scrutinizing every little detail she could see. I could hear her mumbling to herself, "Athena's temple...the third Corinthian column is down...that allegedly happened in 2000, so we're not back in the 1900's." Of course. Instead of walking up to one of the minor gods, or nymphs, and simply asking the date, Annabeth would figure it out herself. As we walked up the pathway to the palace, I noticed everyone looked so carefree and happy, nothing like the world we'd left, where an evil titan lord had just attacked Mt. Olympus.

We walked up into the palace, and right before we opened the doors to the throne room, Annabeth grabbed my elbow, effectively stopping me from moving forward. "Percy...look." I looked down, and saw that the scroll she'd been carrying was changing. It was morphing into a book. The cover was ocean blue, with a raven haired boy standing in the ocean holding a lightning bolt. Even with my dyslexia, I could make out The Lightning Thief. I looked at her questioningly, but she just shrugged and continued on. "If my calculations are right, and I'm nearly positive they are, then this is the winter solstice. The Gods are in the middle of their annual meeting. All twelve Olympians, including Hades, are on the other side of that door."

I just stared at her. "How did you..."

"Simple. The angle between the sun and the palace was designed to hit..."

I interrupted her. "Never mind. Let's go in."

As the doors swung open, all discussion stopped between the gods. They all turned to stare at us. Zeus stood up. "WHO DARES-" I hurriedly ran up and knelt at his feet.

"Lord Zeus. My name is Percy Jackson, and this is Annabeth Chase." At this, both of our respective parents gasped. Zeus turned on them.

"Athena! Poseidon! Do you know these demi-gods?"

Athena shot Poseidon a look. "Let them speak for themselves."

"Anyways, we are both sixteen. We come from the year 2010." All the Gods looked shocked, but I guess time-travel isn't as drastic as I thought it was, because nobody looked too freaked out. "We've just come from-well-Olympus, but three weeks ago, Olympus was destroyed. We are here to change the past-well-future-well..." here's where Annabeth jumped in. She produced the prophecy from where it had been tucked into the book like a bookmark.

She turned to her mother. "You sent us back. I'd recognize your handwriting anywhere. But you all agreed, because it's signed-The Gods."

Zeus seemed to believe us, because his features softened, and he no longer looked as upset that someone had burst into his council. "So what's the book for? And what does the note say?" Annabeth looked over at me and I shook my head, sending her a silent signal not to tell them about the prophecy. Annabeth and I have always been like that. We know what the other is thinking, without having to say anything.

"Well, we wish to keep the exact details of the note private, but the book, I assume, is to be read here. Now. At the council."

"Now wait just one minute!" Zeus broke back in, looking agitated. "That is a sizable book! I refuse to allow my council to be interrupted for who knows how long just to read this book!"

"Father!" Athena exclaimed. "These demi-gods are from the future! They know our destiny! Did you not hear when the boy said Olympus had just been destroyed? They're obviously here to prevent it from happening again! Their information could be invaluable!"

"Well, alright. I'll give you three chapters before we stop-if this proves to be a waste of time." Zeus opened the book and began to read. "Chapter One: I Accidentally Vaporize My Pre-Algebra Teacher." The title raised a few questioning looks, but I just waved them off as Annabeth and I settled on the floor.

**Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood. If you're reading this because you think you might be one: my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life. **

**Being a half-blood is dangerous. It's scary. Most of the time it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.**

**If you're a normal kid, reading this because you think it's fiction, great. Read on. I envy you for being able to believe that none of this ever happened.**

**But if you recognize yourself in these pages-if you feel something stirring inside-stop reading immeadiately. You might be one of us. And once you know that, it's only a matter of time before _they _sense it too, and they'll come for you. **

**Don't say I didn't warn you.**

**My name is Percy Jackson.**

**I'm twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York.**

**Am I a troubled kid?**

**Yeah. You could say that.**

A few of the gods chuckled.

**I could start at any point in my short miserable life to prove it, but things really started going bad last May, when our sixth-grade class tooka field trip to Manhattan- twenty-eight mental case kids and two teachers on a yellow school bus, heading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at ancient Greek and Roman stuff.**

**I know-it sounds like torture. Most Yancy field trips were.**

**But Mr. Brunner, our Latin teacher, was leading this trip, so I had hopes.**

**Mr. Brunner was this middle-aged guy in a motorized wheelchair. He had thinning hair and a scruffy beard and a frayed tweed jacket, which always smelled like coffee. You wouldn't think he'd be cool, but he told stories and jokes and let us play games in class. He also had this awesome collection of Roman armor and weapons, so he was the only teacher whose class didn't put me to sleep.**

"Is that..." Athena trailed off.

"Chiron?" I finished for her. "Yep. That's him."

"Chiron?" Poseidon interjected,"But why is he teaching Roman history? Shouldn't he be teaching Greek?"

"The class was Latin, not Greek." Athena said. "So, it only makes sense that Chiron would teach Roman, because the Romans spoke Latin."

**I hoped the trip would be okay. At least, I hoped that for once I wouldn't get into trouble.**

**Boy, was I wrong.**

**See, bad things happen to me on field trips. Like at my fifth-grade school, when we went to the Saratoga battlefield, I had this accident with a Revolutionary War cannon. I wasn't aiming for the school bus, but of course I got expelled anyway.**

All the gods turned to look at me. I put up my hands in surrender. "It wasn't my fault!" No one moved, just kept staring. "Okay...it was sort of my fault. I plead the fifth!"

**And before that, at my fourth-grade school, when we took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Marine World shark pool, I sort of hit the wrong lever on the catwalk, and our class took an unplanned swim. And the time before that...Well, you get the idea.**

**This trip, I was determined to be good.**

**All the way into the city, I put up with Nancy Bobofit, the freckly, red headed kleptomaniac girl, hitting my best friend Grover in the back of the head with chunks of peanut butter-and-ketchup sandwich.**

**Grover was an easy target. He was scrawny. He cried when he got frustrated. He must've been held back several grades, because he was the only sixth grader with acne and the start of a wispy beard on his chin. On top of all that, he was crippled. He had a note excusing him from PE for the rest of his life because he had some kind of muscular disease in his legs. He walked funny, like every step hurt him, but don't let that fool you. You should've seen him run when it was enchilada day in the cafeteria. **

"Sounds like one of my satyrs," Dionysus mused.

**Anyway, Nancy Bobofit was throwing wads of sandwich that stuck in his curly brown hair, and she knew I couldn't do anything back to her because I was was already on probation. The headmaster had threatened me with death by in-school suspension if anything bad, embarrassing, or even mildly entertaining happened on this trip. **

"But something mildly entertaining might not have been your fault!" Annabeth protested. "What if some old lady was walking her dog and wrapped him up in his leash? You're completely innocent, and it was very entertaining!"

**"I'm going to kill her," I mumbled.**

**Grover tried to calm me down. "It's okay. I like peanut butter."**

**He dodged another piece of Nancy's lunch.**

**"That's it." I started to get up, but Grover pulled me back to my seat.**

**"You're already on probation," he reminded me. "You know who'll get blamed if anything happens."**

**Looking back on it, I wish I'd decked Nancy Bobofit right then and there. In-school suspension would've been nothing compared to the mess I was about to get myself into.**

**Mr. Brunner led the museum tour.**

**He rode up front in his wheelchair, guiding us through the big echoey galleries, past marble statues and glass cases full of really old black-and-orange pottery.**

**It blew my mind that this stuff had survived for two thousand, three thousand years.**

**He gathered us around a thirteen-foot-tall stone column with a big sphinx on the top, and started telling us how it was a grave marker, a _stele, _for a girl about our age. He told us about the carvings on the sides. I was trying to listen to what he had to say, because it was kind of interesting, but everyone around me was talking, and every time I told them to shut up, the other teacher chaperone, Mrs. Dodds, would give me the evil eye. **

**Mrs. Dodds was this little math teacher from Georgia who always wore a black leather jacket, even though she was fifty years old. She looked mean enough to ride a Harley right into your locker. She had come to Yancy halfway through the year, when our last math teacher had a nervous breakdown. **

"Oh dear." Hades said. All the gods turned to look at him. "It seems I've planted a Kindly One at Yancy Academy."

Everyone gaped at him, shocked, before Zeus said, "What? Why would you plant a Kindly One at-"

I cut him off. "It's alright. I know why. They knew I was powerful, and they thought I had something important. At the time, I was the prime suspect for stealing-" Here Annabeth had a sudden fake coughing fit.

"Percy...*cough*...I need to talk to you." She dragged me out of the throne room. "Percy, what were you thinking? You can't tell them that they suspected you of stealing the symbols of power from two of the Big Three Gods! You'll get blown up before you can say another word!"

I thought about that. She had a point. "Okay, so when do we tell them? They're going to find out sooner or later."

"Let's hold off until the end of the first chapter. Then we can tell them who our parents are, what's happened, and why their symbols of power are missing." We walked back into the throne room.

"What were you two lovebirds doing?" Aphrodite asked with a suggestive wink. Annabeth and I turned various shades of red.

"Nothing." We chorused.

"So, Percy, you were saying something about my Kindly One? I assume it was Alecto-"

"Hades, we've decided not to disclose any information the book doesn't until the end of this chapter. It's going to be a while."

**From her first day, Mrs. Dodds loved Nancy Bobofit, and figured I was devils spawn. She would point her crooked finger at me and say, "Now, honey," real sweet, and I knew I was going to get after-school detention for a month.**

**One time, after she'd made me erase math workbooks until midnight, I told Grover I didn't think Mrs. Dodds was human. He looked at me, real serious, and said, "You're absolutely right." **

"Ha!" Dionysus exclaimed. "I knew he was a satyr! He knows she's a monster!"

**Mr. Brunner kept talking about Greek funeral art.**

**Finally, Nancy Bobofit snickered something about the naked guy on the stele, and I turned around and said, "Will you _shut up?_"**

**It came out louder than I meant it to.**

**The whole group laughed. Mr. Brunner stopped his story.**

**"Mr. Jackson," he said, "did you have a comment?" My face was totally red. I said, "No, sir."**

**Mr. Brunner pointed to one of the pictures on the stele. "Perhaps you'll tell us what this picture represents?"**

**I looked at the carving and felt a flush of relief, because I actually recognized it. "That's Kronos eating his kids, right?"**

**"Yes," Mr. Brunner said, obviously not satisfied. "And he did this because..."**

**"Well...I racked my brain to remember. "Kronos was the king god, and-"**

"Our father, a god? Yeah, right." said Poseidon.

**"God?" Mr. Brunner asked.**

**"Titan," I corrected myself. "And...he didn't trust his kids, who were the gods. So, um, Kronos ate them, right? But his wife his baby Zeus, and gave Kronos a rock to eat instead. And later, when Zeus grew up, he tricked his dad, Kronos, into barfing up his brothers and sisters-"**

**"Eeew!" said one of the girls behind me.**

**"-and so there was this big fight between the gods and the Titans," I continued, "and the gods won."**

"Well, of course!" Zeus said. "We weren't about to let the Titans take over the world!"

**Some snickers from the group.**

**Behind me, Nancy Bobofit mumbled to a friend, "Like we're going to use this in real life. Like it's going to say on our job applications, 'Please explain why Kronos ate his kids.'"**

**"And why, Mr. Jackson," Brunner said, "to paraphrase Miss Bobofit's excellent question, does this matter in real life?"**

"Well, it's obvious!" Apollo said, "It matters because Mt. Olympus is currently hanging over your heads children! And the twelve olympians are right above your very own New York City!"

**"Busted," Grover muttered.**

**"Shut up," Nancy hissed, her face even brighter than her hair.**

**At least Nancy got packed, too. Mr. Brunner was only one who ever caught her saying anthing wrong. He had radar ears.**

**I thought about his question, and shrugged, "I don't know, sir." **

**"I see." Mr. Brunner looked disappointed. "Well, half credit, Mr. Jackson."**

**"Zeus did indeed feed Kronos a mixture of mustard and wine, which made him disgorge his other five children, who, of course, being immortal gods, had been living and growing up completely undigested in the Titan's stomach. The gods defeated their father, sliced him to pieces with his own scythe, and scattered his remains in Tartarus, the darkest part of the Underworld. On that happy note, it's time for lunch. Mrs. Dodds, would you lead us back outside?"**

**The class drifted off, the girls holding their stomachs-**

"Wimps." Ares muttered.

**and the guys pushing each other and acting like doofuses.**

"So, acting normally?" Annabeth asked.

"Shut up." I said, "Not all guys are stupid!"

**Grover and I were about to follow when Mr. Brunner said, "Mr. Jackson."**

**I knew that was coming.**

**I told Grover to keep going. Then I turned toward Mr. Brunner. "Sir?"**

**Mr. Brunner had this look that wouldn't let you go-intense brown eyes that could've been a thousand years old and had seen everything.**

**"You must learn the answer to my question," Mr. Brunner told me. **

**"About the Titans?"**

**"About real life. And how your studies apply to it."**

**"Oh."**

**"What you learn from me," he said, "is vitally important. I expect you to treat it as such. I will accept only the best from you, Percy Jackson."**

**I wanted to get angry, this guy pushed me so hard. **

"He pushes you because he wants you to stay alive, Percy." Annabeth said. "Admit it, without him, you'd be dead."

**I mean, sure, it was kind of cool on tournament days, when he dressed up in a suit of Roman armor and shouted: "What ho!" and challenged us, sword-point against chalk, to run to the board and name every Greek and Roman person who had ever lived, and their mother, and what god they worshipped.**

"Kind of cool?" Annabeth asked, "That's awesome!"

**But Mr. Brunner expected me to be as good as everybody else, despite the fact that I have dyslexia and attention deficit disorder and I have never made above a C- in my life.**

**No-he didn't expect me to be _as good_, he expected me to be _better_. And I just couldn't learn all those names and facts, much less spell them correctly.**

**I mumbled something about trying harder, while Mr. Brunner took one long sad look at the stele, like he'd been at this girls funeral.**

"He probably was..." Annabeth said.

**He told me to go outside and eat my lunch.**

**The class gathered on the front steps of the museum, where we could watch the foot traffic along Fifth Avenue.**

"People watching," Hestia said. "One of my favorite activities. People are all so different!"

**Overhead, a huge storm was brewing, with clouds blacker than I'd ever seen over the city. I figured maybe it was global warming or something, because the weather across New York state had been weird since Christmas. We had massive snow storms, flooding, wildfires from lightning strikes. I wouldn't have been surprised if this was a hurricane blowing in.**

"What's been causing that?" Zeus broke himself off. I just stared at him. "Oh," he said, as he realized, "Me."

"Well," Annabeth whispered. "Technically, it's not you because your lightning bolt is gone."

"Did you have something to say, dear?" Zeus said.

Annabeth's head whipped up and around. "No sir!"

**Nobody else seemed to notice. Some of the guys were pelting pigeons with lunchables crackers. Nancy Bobofit was trying to pickpocket something from a lady's purse, and, of course, Mrs. Dodds wasn't seeing a thing.**

**Grover and I sat on the edge of the fountain, away from the others. We thought that maybe if we did that, everybody wouldn't know we were from _that _school-the school for loser freaks who couldn't make it elsew****here.**

**"Detention?" Grover asked.**

"Chiron wouldn't give you detention..." Annabeth commented. "Would he?"

**"Nah," I said. "Not from Brunner. I just wish he'd lay off me sometimes. I mean-I'm not a genius."**

**Grover didn't say anything for a while. Then, when I thought he was going to give me some deep philosophical comment to make me feel better, he said, "Can I have your apple?"**

**I didn't have much of an appetite, so I let him take it.**

**I watched the stream of cabs going down Fifth Avenue, and thought about my mom's apartment, only a little ways uptown from where we sat. I hadn't seen her since Christmas. I wanted so bad to jump in a taxi and head home. She'd hug me and be glad to see me, but she'd be disappointed, too. She'd send me right back to Yancy, remind me that I had to try harder, even if this was my sixth school in six years and I was probably going to be kicked out again. I wouldn't be able to stand that sad look she'd give me.**

"Aww," Aphrodite cooed. "That's so sweet, you must really love your mom..."

**Mr. Bruner parked his wheelchair at the base of the handicapped ramp. He ate celery while he read a paperback novel. A red umbrella stick up from the back of his chair, making it look like a motorized cafe table.**

Annabeth stifled a laugh. "It does look like that, doesn't it? Your eleven year old thoughts are hilarious, Percy."

**I was about to unwrap my sandwich when Nancy Bobofit appeared in front of me with her ugly friends-I guess she'd gotten tired of stealing from the tourists-and dumped her half-eaten lunch in Grover's lap.**

**"Oops." She grinned at me with her crooked teeth. Her freckles were orange, as if somebody had spray-painted her face with liquid Cheetos.**

**I tried to stay cool. The school counselor had told me a million times, "Count to ten, get control of your temper." But I was so mad my mind went blank. A wave roared in my ears.**

**I don't remember touching her, but the next thing I knew, Nancy was sitting on her butt in the fountain, screaming, "Percy pushed me!"**

**Mrs. Dodds materialized next to us. **

"She probably literally materialized," Athena mused...

**Some of the kids were whispering: "Did you see-"**

**"-the water-"**

**"-like it grabbed her-"**

Zeus got a wierd look in his eye and slowly turned to face Poseidon. Poseidon shrank a little under his gaze, and reached out to grab the book from Zeus. "Let's continue reading," Poseidon said quickly.

**I didn't know what they were talking about. All I knew was that I was in trouble again.**

**As soon as Mrs. Dodds was sure poor little Nancy was okay, promising to get her a new shirt at the museum gift shop, etc., etc., Mrs. Dodds turned on me. There was a triumphant fire in her eyes as if I'd done something she'd been waiting for all semester. "Now, honey-"**

**"I know," I grumbled. "A month erasing workbooks.**

**That wasn't the right thing to say.**

**"Come with me," Mrs. Dodds said. **

"Uh, oh," Hades said. "I really don't know how you're going to get out of this, Percy. Alecto is my best fury."

**"Wait!" Grover yelped. "It was me. _I _pushed her."**

**I stared at him stunned. I couldn't believe he was trying to cover for me. Mrs. Dodds scared Grover to death.**

**She glared at him so hard his whiskery chin trembled.**

**"I don't think so, Mr. Underwood," she said.**

**"But-"**

**"You-will-stay-here."**

**Grover looked at me desperately.**

**"It's okay, man," I told him. "Thanks for trying."**

"I don't think he's worried about you getting detention, Percy." Athena said. "He's worried about something else."

**"Honey," Mrs. Dodds barked at me. "Now."**

**Nancy Bobofit smirked.**

**I gave her my deluxe I'll-kill-you-later stare. Then I turned to face Mrs. Dodds, but she wasn't there. She was standing at the museum entrance, way at the top of the steps, gesturing impatiently at me to come on.**

**How'd she get there so fast?**

**I have moments like that a lot, when my brain falls asleep of something, and the next thing I know I've missed something, as if a puzzle piece fell out of the universe and left me staring at the blank place behind it. The school counselor told me this was part of the ADHD, my brain misinterpreting things.**

"No, Percy, that's just the mist." Poseidon said.

"I know tha-wait. Did you just talk to the book?"

"Um, no?"

**I wasn't so sure.**

**I went after Mrs. Dodds.**

**Halfway up the steps, I glanced back at Grover. He was looking pale, cutting his eyes between me and Mr. Brunner like he wanted Mr. Brunner to notice what was going on, but Mr. Brunner was absorbed in his novel. **

"Yes, of course!" Annabeth said. "Chiron, notice! Percy is being kidnapped by a fury!"

"Annabeth, now you're doing it too."

"What?"

"Talking to the book..."

**I looked back up. Mrs. Dodds had disappeared again. She was now inside the building, at the end of the entrance hall.**

**Okay, I thought. She's going to make me buy a new shirt for Nancy at the gift shop.**

**But apparently that wasn't the plan.**

**I followed her deeper into the museum. When I finally caught up to her , we were back in the Greek and Roman section.**

**Except for us, the gallery was empty.**

**Mrs. Dodds stood with her arms crossed in front of a big marble frieze of the Greek gods. She was making this weird noise in her throat, like growling.**

**Even without the noise, I would've been nervous. It's weird being alone with a teacher, especially Mrs. Dodds. Something about the way she looked at the frieze, as if she wanted to pulverize it... **

"Uh, oh..."

**"You've been giving us problems, honey," she said.**

**I did the safe thing. I said, "Yes, ma'am."**

**She tugged on the cuffs of her leather jacket. "Did you really think you could get away with it?"**

**The look in her eyes was beyond mad. It was evil.**

**She's a teacher, I thought nervously. It's not like she's going to hurt me. **

"Are you sure about that?" Hades asked, sarcastically. "I think this teacher might..."

**I said, "I'll-I'll try harder ma'am."**

**Thunder shook the building.**

**"We are not fools, Percy Jackson," Mrs. Dodds said. "It was only a matter of time before we found you out. Confess, and you will suffer less pain."**

**I didn't know what she was talking about.**

**All I could think of was that the teachers must've found the illegal stash of candy I'd been selling out of my dorm room.**

"Yes!" Hermes said. "Way to go, kid!"

**Or maybe they'd realized I got my essay on _Tom Sawyer _from the internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book.**

**"Well?" she demanded.**

**"Ma'am, I don't..."**

**"Your time is up," she hissed.**

**Then the weirdest thing happened. Her eyes began to glow like barbecue coals. Her fingers stretched, turning into talons. Her jacket melted into large, leathery wings. She wasn't human. She was a shriveled hag with bat wings and claws and a mouth full of yellow fangs, and she was about to slice me to ribbons. **

"Alecto..." Hades said. "She is my best warrior, boy, if you best her..."

**Then things got even stranger.**

**Mr. Brunner, who'd been out in front of the museum a minute before, wheeled his chair into the doorway of the gallery, holding a pen in his hand.**

**"What ho, Percy!" he shouted, and tossed the pen through the air.**

**Mrs. Dodds lunged at me.**

**With a yelp, I dodged and felt talons slash the air next to my ear. I snatched the ballpoint pen out of the air, but when it hit my hand, it wasn't a pen anymore. It was a sword-Mr. Brunner's bronze sword, which he always used on tournament day.**

"Wicked cool!" Apollo said. "A pen/sword? Awesome!"

**Mrs. Dodds spun toward me with a murderous look in her eyes.**

**My knees were jelly. My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped the sword.**

**She snarled, "Die, honey!"**

**And she flew straight at me.**

Poseidon let out a strangled squeak. Zeus turned to look at him. "It's nothing," he said. "Just...(cough) a little sneeze!"

**Absolute terror ran through my body. I did the only thing that came naturally: I swung the sword.**

**The metal blade hit her shoulder and passed clean through her body as if she were made of water. _Hiss!_**

**Mrs. Dodds was a sand castle in a power fan. She exploded into yellow powder, vaporized on the spot, leaving nothing but the smell of sulfur and a dying screech and a chill of evil in the air, as if those two glowing red eyes were still watching me. **

"What?" Hades said. He was sitting on his throne, stunned. "What? You, a mere twelve year old, bested my best fury, with one swing of the sword? That is not possible!" He looked like he could go on for quite some more time, when Zeus shut him up with a stern look.

**I was alone.**

**There was a ballpoint pen in my hand.**

**Mr. Brunner wasn't there. Nobody was there but me.**

**My hands were still trembling. My lunch must've been contaminated with magic mushrooms or something.**

**Had I imagined the whole thing?**

**I went back outside.**

**It had started to rain.**

**Grover was sitting by the fountain, a museum map tented over his head. Nancy Bobofit was still standing there, soaked from her swim in the fountain, grumbling to her ugly friends. When she saw me, she said, "I hope Mrs. Kerr whipped your butt."**

"Who?" Demeter asked. "There is no Mrs. Kerr."

**I said, "Who?"**

**"Our teacher. Duh!"**

**I blinked. We had no teacher named Mrs. Kerr. I asked Nancy what she was talking about.**

**She just rolled her eyes and turned away.**

**I asked Grover who Mrs. Dodds was.**

**He said, "Who?"**

**But he paused first, and he wouldn't look at me, so I thought he was messing with me.**

**"Not funny, man," I told him. "This is serious."**

**Thunder boomed overhead.**

**I saw Mr. Brunner sitting under his red umbrella, reading his book, as if he'd never moved.**

**I went over to him.**

**He looked up, a little distracted. "Ah, that would be my pen. Please bring your own writing utensil in the future, Mr. Jackson."**

**I handed Mr. Brunner his pen. I hadn't even realized I was still holding it.**

**"Sir," I said, "where's Mrs. Dodds?"**

**He stared at me blankly. "Who?" **

Athena who had been deep in thought through the last page suddenly jumped up and snapped her fingers. It looked just like Annabeth when she gets an idea. "It's the Mist!"

All the gods just stared at her.

"The Mist! It's causing the humans to think that there was no Mrs. Dodds!."

**"The other chaperone. Mrs. Dodds. The pre-algebra teacher."**

**He frowned and sat forward, looking mildly concerned. "Percy, there is no Mrs. Dodds on this trip. As far as I know, there has never been a Mrs. Dodds at Yancy Academy. Are you feeling all right?"**

* * *

**So that's it. I decided to send them back in the first chapter, because it got really repetitive when they went back and had to re-read...**

**~MusicIsHarmony**


	3. Chapter 3

**Okay, I have a big question for ya'll. This is about half of Chapter 1. Would you like me to split the chapters up into two or three fanfiction chapters, or do one book chapter at a time? With splitting chapters, I'll be able to update a lot more often, and then at the end, I can always edit the correct chapters together. Tell me in a review or PM please! **

**Another thing, to clarify things up. This is right after The Battle of The Labrynith. Percy and Annabeth are not dating, and the gods are in the dark, so they don't know anything about Kronos, or anything like that. **

**Thanks a ton to my reviewers! Glostera, allen r, christisrisen, F.A.L.T.U., athenagirl, and kat callen!**

**Enjoy this chapter!**

**Disclaimer: I do not own PJO!**

**My name is Percy Jackson. **

**I'm twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York. **

**Am I a troubled kid? **

**Yeah. You could say that. **

Annabeth snorted. "Troubled? Percy? Nah, just a seaweed brain."

**I could start at any point in my short miserable life to prove it, but things really started going bad last May, when our sixth-grade class tooka field trip to Manhattan- twenty-eight mental case kids and two teachers on a yellow school bus, heading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at ancient Greek and Roman stuff.**

**I know-it sounds like torture. Most Yancy field trips were. **

**But Mr. Brunner, our Latin teacher, was leading this trip, so I had hopes. **

**Mr. Brunner was this middle-aged guy in a motorized wheelchair. He had thinning hair and a scruffy beard and a frayed tweed jacket, which always smelled like coffee. You wouldn't think he'd be cool, but he told stories and jokes and let us play games in class. He also had this awesome collection of Roman armor and weapons, so he was the only teacher whose class didn't put me to sleep. **

"Is that..." Annabeth trailed off.

"Chiron?" I finished for her. "Yep. That's him."

"Chiron?" Poseidon interjected,"But why is he teaching Roman history? Shouldn't he be teaching Greek?"

"The class was Latin, not Greek." Annabeth said. "So, it only makes sense that Chiron would teach Roman, because the Romans spoke Latin."

**I hoped the trip would be okay. At least, I hoped that for once I wouldn't get into trouble. **

**Boy, was I wrong. **

**See, bad things happen to me on field trips. Like at my fifth-grade school, when we went to the Saratoga battlefield, I had this accident with a Revolutionary War cannon. I wasn't aiming for the school bus, but of course I got expelled anyway.**

All the gods turned to look at me. I put up my hands, "Hey, I was eleven! How was I supposed to know they still worked?"

Ares said "How did you know they still worked? You're the son of a god, even if they didn't work, you could probably make them work!"

** And before that, at my fourth-grade school, when we took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Marine World shark pool, I sort of hit the wrong lever on the catwalk, and our class took an unplanned swim. And the time before that...Well, you get the idea. **

**This trip, I was determined to be good. **

**All the way into the city, I put up with Nancy Bobofit, the freckly, red headed kleptomaniac girl, hitting my best friend Grover in the back of the head with chunks of peanut butter-and-ketchup sandwich. **

**Grover was an easy target. He was scrawny. He cried when he got frustrated. He must've been held back several grades, because he was the only sixth grader with acne and the start of a wispy beard on his chin. On top of all that, he was crippled. He had a note excusing him from PE for the rest of his life because he had some kind of muscular disease in his legs. He walked funny, like every step hurt him, but don't let that fool you. You should've seen him run when it was enchilada day in the cafeteria. **

Grover looked a little sad. "Is that really what everybody thought of me? A stupid crippled kid?"

I replied, "Ah, man, the crippled thing was an act anyways, and nobody thought you were stupid. They just wanted to know why you looked more grown-up then them."

"Thanks, Perce."

**Anyway, Nancy Bobofit was throwing wads of sandwich that stuck in his curly brown hair, and she knew I couldn't do anything back to her because I was was already on probation. The headmaster had threatened me with death by in-school suspension if anything bad, embarrassing, or even mildly entertaining happened on this trip. **

"In-school detention would be great!" Dionysus said. "Then you never would have come to camp!"

**"I'm going to kill her," I mumbled.**

**Grover tried to calm me down. "It's okay. I like peanut butter."**

**He dodged another piece of Nancy's lunch.**

**"That's it." I started to get up, but Grover pulled me back to my seat.**

**"You're already on probation," he reminded me. "You know who'll get blamed if anything happens."**

**Looking back on it, I wish I'd decked Nancy Bobofit right then and there. In-school suspension would've been nothing compared to the mess I was about to get myself into. **

My mom looked over from her spot in the circle. "Is this when I finally get to hear about the reason you left for camp?"

"Yeah, mom, but you're not going to like it."

**Mr. Brunner led the museum tour. **

**He rode up front in his wheelchair, guiding us through the big echoey galleries, past marble statues and glass cases full of really old black-and-orange pottery. **

**It blew my mind that this stuff had survived for two thousand, three thousand years. **

**He gathered us around a thirteen-foot-tall stone column with a big sphinx on the top, and started telling us how it was a grave marker, a _stele, _for a girl about our age. He told us about the carvings on the sides. I was trying to listen to what he had to say, because it was kind of interesting, but everyone around me was talking, and every time I told them to shut up, the other teacher chaperone, Mrs. Dodds, would give me the evil eye. **

**Mrs. Dodds was this little math teacher from Georgia who always woree a black leather jacket, even though she was fifty years old. She looked mean enough to ride a Harley right into your locker. She had come to Yancy halfway through the year, when our last math teacher had a nervous breakdown.**

"Ah, Chiron." Dionysus sighed. "Camp was so pleasant when the old horse-man was gone, watching over you..." Athena elbowed him in the side. "Alright, alright, I mean, it was so good to know you were safe, Percy Jackson."

**From her first day, Mrs. Dodds loved Nancy Bobofit, and figured I was devils spawn. She would point her crooked finger at me and say, "Now, honey," real sweet, and I knew I was going to get after-school detention for a month.**

**One time, after she'd made me erase math workbooks until midnight, I told Grover I didn't think Mrs. Dodds was human. He looked at me, real serious, and said, "You're absolutely right."**

Grover moaned, "I'd forgotten. I almost blew my cover there, and I remember iris-messaging Chiron about it. He told me not to worry, you'd assume it was too many video gaming influences." We all chuckled a little at that.

**Mr. Brunner kept talking about Greek funeral art. **

**Finally, Nancy Bobofit snickered something about the naked guy on the stele, and I turned around and said, "Will you _shut up?_"**

**It came out louder than I meant it to. **

**The whole group laughed. Mr. Brunner stopped his story.**

**"Mr. Jackson," he said, "did you have a comment?" My face was totally red. I said, "No, sir." **

**Mr. Brunner pointed to one of the pictures on the stele. "Perhaps you'll tell us what this picture represents?"**

**I looked at the carving and felt a flush of relief, because I actually recognized it. "That's Kronos eating his kids, right?"**

**"Yes," Mr. Brunner said, obviously not satisfied. "And he did this because..."**

**"Well...I racked my brain to remember. "Kronos was the king god, and-" **

"Our father, a god? Yeah, right." said Poseidon.

**"God?" Mr. Brunner asked.**

**"Titan," I corrected myself. "And...he didn't trust his kids, who were the gods. So, um, Kronos ate them, right? But his wife his baby Zeus, and gave Kronos a rock to eat instead. And later, when Zeus grew up, he tricked his dad, Kronos, into barfing up his brothers and sisters-"**

**"Eeew!" said one of the girls behind me.**

**"-and so there was this big fight between the gods and the Titans," I continued, "and the gods won."**

"Well, of course!" Zeus said. "We weren't about to let the Titans take over the world!"

**Some snickers from the group.**

**Behind me, Nancy Bobofit mumbled to a friend, "Like we're going to use this in real life. Like it's going to say on our job applications, 'Please explain why Kronos ate his kids.'"**

**"And why, Mr. Jackson," Brunner said, "to paraphrase Miss Bobofit's excellent question, does this matter in real life?"**

"Well, it's obvious!" Apollo said, "It matters because Mt. Olympus is currently hanging over your heads children! And the twelve olympians are right above your very own New York City!"

**"Busted," Grover muttered.**

**"Shut up," Nancy hissed, her face even brighter than her hair. **

**At least Nancy got packed, too. Mr. Brunner was only one who ever caught her saying anthing wrong. He had radar ears. **

**I thought about his question, and shrugged, "I don't know, sir."**

"What?" Poseidon shouted, "How could you not know?"

"I didn't know I was a demi-god then! I find out in the next chapter or two!"

"Oh..."

**"I see." Mr. Brunner looked disappointed. "Well, half credit, Mr. Jackson."**

"What was he expecting? 'Well, it matters because the gods are still alive today, and I happen to be a child of one of those gods...'" Annabeth mumbled. I smothered a snicker in my sleeve.

**"Zeus did indeed feed Kronos a mixture of mustard and wine, which made him disgorge his other five children, who, of course, being immortal gods, had been living and growing up completely undigested in the Titan's stomach. The gods defeated their father, sliced him to pieces with his own scythe, and scattered his remains in Tartarus, the darkest part of the Underworld. On that happy note, it's time for lunch. Mrs. Dodds, would you lead us back outside?"**

**The class drifted off, the girls holding their stomachs-**

"Wimps." Ares muttered.

**and the guys pushing each other and acting like doofuses. **

"So, acting normally?" Annabeth asked.

"Shut up." I said, "Not all guys are stupid!"

**Grover and I were about to follow when Mr. Brunner said, "Mr. Jackson." **

**I knew that was coming. **

**I told Grover to keep going. Then I turned toward Mr. Brunner. "Sir?"**

**Mr. Brunner had this look that wouldn't let you go-intense brown eyes that could've been a thousand years old and had seen everything. **

**"You must learn the answer to my question," Mr. Brunner told me. **

"Yes!" said Poseidon, "Tell him about the gods!"

**"About the Titans?"**

**"About real life. And how your studies apply to it."**

**"Oh."**

**"What you learn from me," he said, "is vitally important. I expect you to treat it as such. I will accept only the best from you, Percy Jackson."**

**I wanted to get angry, this guy pushed me so hard. **

**I mean, sure, it was kind of cool on tournament days, when he dressed up in a suit of Roman armor and shouted: "What ho!" and challenged us, sword-point against chalk, to run to the board and name every Greek and Roman person who had ever lived, and their mother, and what god they worshipped. **

"Kind of cool?" Annabeth asked, "That's awesome!"

**But Mr. Brunner expected me to be as good as everybody else, despite the fact that I have dyslexia and attention deficit disorder and I have never made above a C- in my life. **

"Wait-" Posiedon interjected, "Why hasn't he been found yet? I mean, obviously Chiron and Grover are there, but why have you left him in the dark? Or why hasn't a monster found him yet?"

"You'll find out." I said, but I refused to say anymore. "Keep reading, Lord Zeus."

**No-he didn't expect me to be _as good_, he expected me to be _better_. And I just couldn't learn all those names and facts, much less spell them correctly.**

**I mumbled something about trying harder, while Mr. Brunner took one long sad look at the stele, like he'd been at this girls funeral.**

He probably was, I thought.

**He told me to go outside and eat my lunch. **

"Speaking of lunch," Grover said. "I need breakfast. Does anybody have any tin cans?"

Zeus replied, "We'll have a half hour breakfast break. But I want everybody back here to read in half an hour!"

**Thanks for reading! Please review and PM me about the chapter lengths please! Next chapter should be out on _OR Before December 12, 2012!_**

**~MusicIsHarmony**


	4. Chapter 4

**Hey! So, I got some PM's and I realized my storyline had a few major flaws, so I'm changing it! This is the only way I can have dialogue with the gods, read the books, and have Percabeth at the same time, and I'm sorry if you don't like it! **

**Thanks to my reviewers: allen r, F.A.L.T.U., kat callan, athenagirl, and Glostara!**

**Disclaimer: I do not own PJO!**

Grover, Annabeth, and I went down into Manhattan to eat with the book, and found a hot-dog stand right next to the Empire State building. Half-way through out hot-dog, a strange blue light shone on us. It seemed to have its own will-power, because it came down and surrounded us. It surrounded us in a vortex of blue light and sent us flying through the air. When we came down again we were in the throne room, but it was different. The chairs for Annabeth, Grover, my mom, Paul, and myself were gone, and all the gods were fighting, nothing like the gods we'd just left.

"You STOLE it!" Zeus roared.

"I did no such thing! Why would I want something to control YOUR realm? I care only for the sea!" Poseidon shouted.

They hadn't noticed us yet, which was a good thing, and I whispered to Annabeth, "What happened? What are they fighting about?"

"It sounds like the lightning bolt..." she whispered back, "but that was...ages ago!"

Finally the gods noticed us. Zeus slowly stalked over. "Who...are...you? How dare you interrupt the gods council! Can you not see that-"

"Annabeth? Is that you, my daughter?" Athena broke into Zeus' tirade. "What are you doing here? You should be at camp. And you look so much older..."

"Explain yourselves! Who are you, and why have you come?"

I stepped forward nervously. "We have come from the future, I guess. This is Grover, satyr and searcher, Annabeth, Daughter of Athena, and Percy Jackson, son of, well, we'll get to that later. We were reading this book with you in the future, and we were just kind-of sucked into this magic light. It brought us here."

"I think we should listen to them. Let me see the book, my child." Annabeth took the book over to her mother. "The Lightning Thief"

"The Lightning Thief? Boy, are you the lightning thief?"

"No, this book is about my first year at Camp Half-Blood, but I did not steal your lightning bolt, Lord Zeus."

"Well, I think we should read this book." Athena, always logical, said, "We must assume they are telling the truth. This girl, is my daughter, but a older version. I believe her."

"Alright, alright. But only because Athena vouches for you." I had a crazy sense of deja vu when he conjured wicker chairs for us, just like the ones we had before, and opened the book to read.

**Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood. If you're reading this because you think you might be one: my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life. **

**Being a half-blood is dangerous. It's scary. Most of the time it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.**

Ares snorted, and I heard him mumbling,"dangerous...ha!"

**If you're a normal kid, reading this because you think it's fiction, great. Read on. I envy you for being able to believe that none of this ever happened.**

**But if you recognize yourself in these pages-if you feel something stirring inside-stop reading immediately. You might be one of us. And once you know that, it's only a matter of time before _they _sense it too, and they'll come for you. **

**Don't say I didn't warn you. **

**My name is Percy Jackson.**

**I'm twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York. **

**Am I a troubled kid? **

**Yeah. You could say that. **

Annabeth snorted. "Troubled? Percy? Nah, just a seaweed brain."

**I could start at any point in my short miserable life to prove it, but things really started going bad last May, when our sixth-grade class took a field trip to Manhattan-twenty-eight mental case kids and two teachers on a yellow school bus, heading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at ancient Greek and Roman stuff.**

"That's a very good museum," Athena said. "Full of great battle weapons."

**I know-it sounds like torture. Most Yancy field trips were. **

**But Mr. Brunner, our Latin teacher, was leading this trip, so I had hopes. **

**Mr. Brunner was this middle-aged guy in a motorized wheelchair. He had thinning hair and a scruffy beard and a frayed tweed jacket, which always smelled like coffee. You wouldn't think he'd be cool, but he told stories and jokes and let us play games in class. He also had this awesome collection of Roman armor and weapons, so he was the only teacher whose class didn't put me to sleep. **

"Is that..." Annabeth trailed off.

"Chiron?" I finished for her. "Yep. That's him."

"Chiron?" Poseidon interjected,"But why is he teaching Roman history? Shouldn't he be teaching Greek?"

"The class was Latin, not Greek." Annabeth said. "So, it only makes sense that Chiron would teach Roman, because the Romans spoke Latin."

**I hoped the trip would be okay. At least, I hoped that for once I wouldn't get into trouble. **

**Boy, was I wrong. **

**See, bad things happen to me on field trips. Like at my fifth-grade school, when we went to the Saratoga battlefield, I had this accident with a Revolutionary War cannon. I wasn't aiming for the school bus, but of course I got expelled anyway.**

All the gods turned to look at me. I put up my hands, "Hey, I was eleven! How was I supposed to know they still worked?"

Ares said "How did you know they still worked? You're the son of a god, even if they didn't work, you could probably make them work!"

** And before that, at my fourth-grade school, when we took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Marine World shark pool, I sort of hit the wrong lever on the catwalk, and our class took an unplanned swim. And the time before that...Well, you get the idea. **

**This trip, I was determined to be good. **

**All the way into the city, I put up with Nancy Bobofit, the freckly, red-headed kleptomaniac girl, hitting my best friend Grover in the back of the head with chunks of peanut butter-and-ketchup sandwich. **

**Grover was an easy target. He was scrawny. He cried when he got frustrated. He must've been held back several grades, because he was the only sixth grader with acne and the start of a wispy beard on his chin. On top of all that, he was crippled. He had a note excusing him from PE for the rest of his life because he had some kind of muscular disease in his legs. He walked funny, like every step hurt him, but don't let that fool you. You should've seen him run when it was enchilada day in the cafeteria. **

Grover looked a little sad. "Is that really what everybody thought of me? A stupid crippled kid?"

I replied, "Ah, man, the crippled thing was an act anyways, and nobody thought you were stupid. They just wanted to know why you looked more grown-up than them."

"Thanks, Perce."

**Anyway, Nancy Bobofit was throwing wads of sandwich that stuck in his curly brown hair, and she knew I couldn't do anything back to her because I was already on probation. The headmaster had threatened me with death by in-school suspension if anything bad, embarrassing, or even mildly entertaining happened on this trip. **

**"I'm going to kill her," I mumbled.**

**Grover tried to calm me down. "It's okay. I like peanut butter."**

**He dodged another piece of Nancy's lunch.**

**"That's it." I started to get up, but Grover pulled me back to my seat.**

**"You're already on probation," he reminded me. "You know who'll get blamed if anything happens."**

**Looking back on it, I wish I'd decked Nancy Bobofit right then and there. In-school suspension would've been nothing compared to the mess I was about to get myself into. **

"Percy," Annabeth sighed, "When are you going to learn? It always gets worse for you, no matter what situation you're in!"

"You know..." Aphrodite said, "You two would be great together. It seems like you are perfect for each other."

"What? No!" Annabeth and I said simultaneously. "We are friends!"

"Really good friends," Grover muttered next to me.

"Shut up, goat boy!" We both said, and shoved him on the shoulder.

"See?" Aphrodite continued, "You even say the same things!"

**Mr. Brunner led the museum tour. **

**He rode up front in his wheelchair, guiding us through the big echoey galleries, past marble statues and glass cases full of really old black-and-orange pottery. **

**It blew my mind that this stuff had survived for two thousand, three thousand years. **

**He gathered us around a thirteen-foot-tall stone column with a big sphinx on the top, and started telling us how it was a grave marker, a _stele, _for a girl about our age. He told us about the carvings on the sides. I was trying to listen to what he had to say, because it was kind of interesting, but everyone around me was talking, and every time I told them to shut up, the other teacher chaperone, Mrs. Dodds, would give me the evil eye. **

**Mrs. Dodds was this little math teacher from Georgia who always wore a black leather jacket, even though she was fifty years old. She looked mean enough to ride a Harley right into your locker. She had come to Yancy halfway through the year, when our last math teacher had a nervous breakdown.**

"It sounds like...nevermind." Athena said, and I knew she probably had realized that Mrs. Dodds was a Fury.

**From her first day, Mrs. Dodds loved Nancy Bobofit, and figured I was devils spawn. She would point her crooked finger at me and say, "Now, honey," real sweet, and I knew I was going to get after-school detention for a month.**

**One time, after she'd made me erase math workbooks until midnight, I told Grover I didn't think Mrs. Dodds was human. He looked at me, real serious, and said, "You're absolutely right."**

Grover moaned, "I'd forgotten. I almost blew my cover there, and I remember iris-messaging Chiron about it. He told me not to worry, you'd assume it was too many video gaming influences." We all chuckled a little at that.

**Mr. Brunner kept talking about Greek funeral art. **

**Finally, Nancy Bobofit snickered something about the naked guy on the stele, and I turned around and said, "Will you _shut up?_"**

**It came out louder than I meant it to. **

**The whole group laughed. Mr. Brunner stopped his story.**

**"Mr. Jackson," he said, "did you have a comment?" My face was totally red. I said, "No, sir." **

**Mr. Brunner pointed to one of the pictures on the stele. "Perhaps you'll tell us what this picture represents?"**

**I looked at the carving and felt a flush of relief, because I actually recognized it. "That's Kronos eating his kids, right?"**

**"Yes," Mr. Brunner said, obviously not satisfied. "And he did this because..."**

**"Well...I racked my brain to remember. "Kronos was the king god, and-" **

"Our father, a god? Yeah, right." said Poseidon.

**"God?" Mr. Brunner asked.**

**"Titan," I corrected myself. "And...he didn't trust his kids, who were the gods. So, um, Kronos ate them, right? But his wife his baby Zeus, and gave Kronos a rock to eat instead. And later, when Zeus grew up, he tricked his dad, Kronos, into barfing up his brothers and sisters-"**

**"Eeew!" said one of the girls behind me.**

**"-and so there was this big fight between the gods and the Titans," I continued, "and the gods won."**

"Well, of course!" Zeus said. "We weren't about to let the Titans take over the world!"

**Some snickers from the group.**

**Behind me, Nancy Bobofit mumbled to a friend, "Like we're going to use this in real life. Like it's going to say on our job applications, 'Please explain why Kronos ate his kids.'"**

**"And why, Mr. Jackson," Brunner said, "to paraphrase Miss Bobofit's excellent question, does this matter in real life?"**

"Well, it's obvious!" Apollo said, "It matters because Mt. Olympus is currently hanging over your heads children! And the twelve Olympians are right above your very own New York City!"

**"Busted," Grover muttered.**

**"Shut up," Nancy hissed, her face even brighter than her hair. **

**At least Nancy got packed, too. Mr. Brunner was only one who ever caught her saying anything wrong. He had radar ears. **

**I thought about his question, and shrugged, "I don't know, sir."**

**"I see." Mr. Brunner looked disappointed. "Well, half credit, Mr. Jackson."**

"What was he expecting? 'Well, it matters because the gods are still alive today, and I happen to be a child of one of those gods...'" Annabeth mumbled. I smothered a snicker in my sleeve.

**"Zeus did indeed feed Kronos a mixture of mustard and wine, which made him disgorge his other five children, who, of course, being immortal gods, had been living and growing up completely undigested in the Titan's stomach. The gods defeated their father, sliced him to pieces with his own scythe, and scattered his remains in Tartarus, the darkest part of the Underworld. On that happy note, it's time for lunch. Mrs. Dodds, would you lead us back outside?"**

**The class drifted off, the girls holding their stomachs-**

"Wimps." Ares muttered.

**and the guys pushing each other and acting like doofuses. **

"So, acting normally?" Annabeth asked.

"Shut up." I said, "Not all guys are stupid!" Aphrodite just giggled and hummed a love song.

**Grover and I were about to follow when Mr. Brunner said, "Mr. Jackson." **

**I knew that was coming. **

**I told Grover to keep going. Then I turned toward Mr. Brunner. "Sir?"**

**Mr. Brunner had this look that wouldn't let you go-intense brown eyes that could've been a thousand years old and had seen everything. **

**"You must learn the answer to my question," Mr. Brunner told me. **

**"About the Titans?"**

**"About real life. And how your studies apply to it."**

**"Oh."**

**"What you learn from me," he said, "is vitally important. I expect you to treat it as such. I will accept only the best from you, Percy Jackson."**

**I wanted to get angry, this guy pushed me so hard. **

**I mean, sure, it was kind of cool on tournament days, when he dressed up in a suit of Roman armor and shouted: "What ho!" and challenged us, sword-point against chalk, to run to the board and name every Greek and Roman person who had ever lived, and their mother, and what god they worshipped. **

"Kind of cool?" Annabeth asked, "That's awesome!"

**But Mr. Brunner expected me to be as good as everybody else, despite the fact that I have dyslexia and attention deficit disorder and I have never made above a C- in my life. **

"Wait-" Poseidon interjected, "Why haven't you been found yet? I mean, obviously Chiron and Grover are there, but why have they left Percy in the dark? Or why hasn't a monster found you yet?"

"You'll find out." I said, but I refused to say anymore. "Keep reading, Lord Zeus."

**No-he didn't expect me to be _as good_, he expected me to be _better_. And I just couldn't learn all those names and facts, much less spell them correctly.**

**I mumbled something about trying harder, while Mr. Brunner took one long sad look at the stele, like he'd been at this girls funeral.**

He probably was, I thought.

**He told me to go outside and eat my lunch. **

**The class gathered on the front steps of the museum, where we could watch the foot traffic along Fifth Avenue.**

"People watching," Hestia said. "One of my favorite activities. People are all so different!"

**Overhead, a huge storm was brewing, with clouds blacker than I'd ever seen over the city. I figured maybe it was global warming or something, because the weather across New York state had been weird since Christmas. We had massive snow storms, flooding, wildfires from lightning strikes. I wouldn't have been surprised if this was a hurricane blowing in. **

"What's been causing that?" Zeus broke himself off. The three demi-gods just stared at him. "Oh," he said, as he realized, "Me."

**Nobody else seemed to notice. Some of the guys were pelting pigeons with lunchables crackers. Nancy Bobofit was trying to pickpocket something from a lady's purse, and, of course, Mrs. Dodds wasn't seeing a thing. **

**Grover and I sat on the edge of the fountain, away from the others. We thought that maybe if we did that, everybody wouldn't know we were from _that _school-the school for loser freaks who couldn't make it elsew****here.**

**"Detention?" Grover asked.**

"Chiron wouldn't give you detention..." Annabeth commented. "Would he?"

**"Nah," I said. "Not from Brunner. I just wish he'd lay off me sometimes. I mean-I'm not a genius."**

**Grover didn't say anything for a while. Then, when I thought he was going to give me some deep philosophical comment to make me feel better, he said, "Can I have your apple?"**

**I didn't have much of an appetite, so I let him take it. **

**I watched the stream of cabs going down Fifth Avenue, and thought about my mom's apartment, only a little ways uptown from where we sat. I hadn't seen her since Christmas. I wanted so bad to jump in a taxi and head home. She'd hug me and be glad to see me, but she'd be disappointed, too. She'd send me right back to Yancy, remind me that I had to try harder, even if this was my sixth school in six years and I was probably going to be kicked out again. I wouldn't be able to stand that sad look she'd give me. **

"Aww," Aphrodite cooed. "That's so sweet, you must really love your mom..."

**Mr. Bruner parked his wheelchair at the base of the handicapped ramp. He ate celery while he read a paperback novel. A red umbrella stick up from the back of his chair, making it look like a motorized cafe table. **

Annabeth stifled a laugh. "It does look like that, doesn't it? Your eleven year old thoughts are hilarious, Percy."

**I was about to unwrap my sandwich when Nancy Bobofit appeared in front of me with her ugly friends-I guess she'd gotten tired of stealing from the tourists-and dumped her half-eaten lunch in Grover's lap. **

**"Oops." She grinned at me with her crooked teeth. Her freckles were orange, as if somebody had spray-painted her face with liquid Cheetos. **

**I tried to stay cool. The school counselor had told me a million times, "Count to ten, get control of your temper." But I was so mad my mind went blank. A wave roared in my ears. **

**I don't remember touching her, but the next thing I knew, Nancy was sitting on her butt in the fountain, screaming, "Percy pushed me!"**

**Mrs. Dodds materialized next to us. **

"Teachers are way too good at that." Grover mumbled, "But Mrs. Dodds was the worst."

**Some of the kids were whispering: "Did you see-"**

**"-the water-" **

**"-like it grabbed her-"**

Zeus got a wierd look in his eye and slowly turned to face Poseidon. Poseidon shrank a little under his gaze, and reached out to grab the book from Zeus. "Let's continue reading," Poseidon said quickly.

**I didn't know what they were talking about. All I knew was that I was in trouble again. **

**As soon as Mrs. Dodds was sure poor little Nancy was okay, promising to get her a new shirt at the museum gift shop, etc., etc., Mrs. Dodds turned on me. There was a triumphant fire in her eyes as if I'd done something she'd been waiting for all semester. "Now, honey-"**

**"I know," I grumbled. "A month erasing workbooks. **

**That wasn't the right thing to say. **

**"Come with me," Mrs. Dodds said. **

"I have a bad feeling about this _Mrs. Dodds."_ Athena said. "I feel like she'd not who she says she is."

**"Wait!" Grover yelped. "It was me. _I _pushed her."**

**I stared at him stunned. I couldn't believe he was trying to cover for me. Mrs. Dodds scared Grover to death. **

**She glared at him so hard his whiskery chin trembled.**

**"I don't think so, Mr. Underwood," she said.**

**"But-"**

**"You-will-stay-here."**

**Grover looked at me desperately. **

**"It's okay, man," I told him. "Thanks for trying."**

"I don't think he's worried about you getting detention, Percy." Athena said. "He's worried about something else."

"I think this Mrs. Dodds is a monster." Zeus declared.

**"Honey," Mrs. Dodds barked at me. "Now."**

**Nancy Bobofit smirked.**

**I gave her my deluxe I'll-kill-you-later stare. Then I turned to face Mrs. Dodds, but she wasn't there. She was standing at the museum entrance, way at the top of the steps, gesturing impatiently at me to come on. **

**How'd she get there so fast?**

"Yep," Athena decided. "Definitely a monster."

**I have moments like that a lot, when my brain falls asleep of something, and the next thing I know I've missed something, as if a puzzle piece fell out of the universe and left me staring at the blank place behind it. The school counselor told me this was part of the ADHD, my brain misinterpreting things. **

"No, Percy, that's just the mist." Poseidon said.

"I know tha-wait. Did you just talk to the book?"

"Um, no?"

**I wasn't so sure. **

**I went after Mrs. Dodds. **

**Halfway up the steps, I glanced back at Grover. He was looking pale, cutting his eyes between me and Mr. Brunner like he wanted Mr. Brunner to notice what was going on, but Mr. Brunner was absorbed in his novel. **

**I looked back up. Mrs. Dodds had disappeared again. She was now inside the building, at the end of the entrance hall. **

**Okay, I thought. She's going to make me buy a new shirt for Nancy at the gift shop. **

**But apparently that wasn't the plan. **

**I followed her deeper into the museum. When I finally caught up to her , we were back in the Greek and Roman section. **

**Except for us, the gallery was empty. **

**Mrs. Dodds stood with her arms crossed in front of a big marble frieze of the Greek gods. She was making this wierd noise in her throat, like growling. **

**Even without the noise, I would've been nervous. It's wierd being alone with a teacher, especially Mrs. Dodds. Something about the way she looked at the frieze, as if she wanted to pulverize it...**

**"You've been giving us problems, honey," she said. **

**I did the safe thing. I said, "Yes, ma'am."**

**She tugged on the cuffs of her leather jacket. "Did you really think you could get away with it?"**

**The look in her eyes was beyond mad. It was evil.**

**She's a teacher, I thought nervously. It's not like she's going to hurt me.**

**I said, "I'll-I'll try harder ma'am."**

**Thunder shook the building.**

**"We are not fools, Percy Jackson," Mrs. Dodds said. "It was only a matter of time before we found you out. Confess, and you will suffer less pain."**

**I didn't know what she was talking about. **

**All I could think of was that the teachers nust've found the illegal stash of candy I'd been selling out of my dorm room. **

"Yes!" Hermes said. "Way to go, kid!"

**Or maybe they'd realized I got my essay on _Tom Sawyer _from the internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book. **

**"Well?" she demanded. **

**"Ma'am, I don't..."**

**"Your time is up," she hissed.**

**Then the weirdest thing happened. Her eyes began to glow like barbecue coals. Her fingers stretched, turning into talons. Her jacket melted into large, leathery wings. She wasn't human. She was a shriveled hag with bat wings and claws and a mouth full of yellow fangs, and she was about to slice me to ribbons.**

Athena gasped. "It's...it's a kindly one! From Hades!" The throne room burst into discussion at this announcement. Zeus had to bang on his throne to get everyone's attention back on the book.

**Then things got even stranger.**

**Mr. Brunner, who'd been out in front of the museum a minute before, wheeled his chair into the doorway of the gallery, holding a pen in his hand. **

**"What ho, Percy!" he shouted, and tossed the pen through the air. **

**Mrs. Dodds lunged at me.**

**With a yelp, I dodged and felt talons slash the air next to my ear. I snatched the ballpoint pen out of the air, but when it hit my hand, it wasn't a pen anymore. It was a sword-Mr. Brunner's bronze sword, which he always used on tournament day.**

"Wicked cool!" Apollo said. "A pen/sword? Awesome!"

**Mrs. Dodds spun toward me with a murderous look in her eyes.**

**My knees were jelly. My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped the sword. **

**She snarled, "Die, honey!"**

**And she flew straight at me. **

Poseidon let out a strangled squeak. Zeus turned to look at him. "It's nothing," he said. "Just...(cough) a little sneeze!" Gods, what is Zeus going to say when he finds out Percy is my son? I'm too young to die!, he thought.

**Absolute terror ran through my body. I did the only thing that came naturally: I swung the sword. **

**The metal blade hit her shoulder and passed clean through her body as if she were made of water. _Hiss!_**

**Mrs. Dodds was a sand castle in a power fan. She exploded into yellow powder, vaporized on the spot, leaving nothing but the smell of sulfur and a dying screech and a chill of evil in the air, as if those two glowing red eyes were still watching me. **

**I was alone. **

**There was a ballpoint pen in my hand. **

**Mr. Brunner wasn't there. Nobody was there but me. **

**My hands were still trembling. My lunch must've been contaminated with magic mushrooms or something. **

**Had I imagined the whole thing?**

**I went back outside. **

**It had started to rain. **

**Grover was sitting by the fountain, a museum map tented over his head. Nancy Bobofit was still standing there, soaked from her swim in the fountain, grumbling to her ugly friends. When she saw me, she said, "I hope Mrs. Kerr whipped your butt."**

"Who?" Demeter asked. "There is no Mrs. Kerr."

**I said, "Who?"**

**"Our teacher. Duh!"**

**I blinked. We had no teacher named Mrs. Kerr. I asked Nancy what she was talking about. **

**She just rolled her eyes and turned away. **

**I asked Grover who Mrs. Dodds was.**

**He said, "Who?"**

**But he paused first, and he wouldn't look at me, so I thought he was messing with me. **

**"Not funny, man," It old him. "This is serious."**

**Thunder boomed overhead.**

**I saw Mr. Brunner sitting under his red umbrella, reading his book, as if he'd never moved. **

**I went over to him. **

**He looked up, a little distracted. "Ah, that would be my pen. Please bring your own writing utensil in the future, Mr. Jackson."**

**I handed Mr. Brunner his pen. I hadn't even realized I was still holding it. **

**"Sir," I said, "where's Mrs. Dodds?"**

**He stared at me blankly. "Who?"**

**"The other chaperone. Mrs. Dodds. The pre-algebra teacher."**

**He frowned and sat forward, looking mildly concerned. "Percy, there is no Mrs. Dodds on this trip. As far as I know, there has never been a Mrs. Dodds at Yancy Academy. Are you feeling all right?"**

"It's the Mist." Athena said.

Zeus passed the book to Poseidon. "Your turn to read. But first, I want to know. Percy, whose son are you?"

"Umm, well, I am a son of, umm," Everybody gasped and I had a kind of deja vu when Annabeth pointed above my head, just like she had that time after capture the flag. I looked up, and a trident was fading away. Poseidon had claimed me. Again.

"BROTHER! You BROKE the oath you swore on the RIVER STYX! You have sired a young hero! HOW COULD YOU?"

* * *

**Thanks for reading! I really hope you like the twist! **

**I'm going to put out two or three more chapters before Christmas, and then I am going on hiatus from Christmas till New Years. **

**~MusicIsHarmony**


	5. Chapter 5

**Okay, first things first, I want everyone reading this to take a moment of silence for those affected by the school shooting on Friday. **

**I want to say that on behalf of everyone on FanFiction, all our hearts go out to those families. **

**Okay! Soo, soo, sorry I haven't updated. Schools driving me crazy, I've got Christmas stuff to do, and yeah. Well, anyway, here's the next chapter. There's some hints of Percabeth *hint* *hint***

**Thanks to my reviewers allen r, R3D N3BuLOS17Y, Guest, and kat callan!**

**Disclaimer: I do not own PJO!**

"You hypocrite!" Percy jumped up. "You sired a child too! Thalia Grace!"

Zeus looked stunned for a minute. Then he said, almost in a reverent tone of voice, "Thalia? My daughter? But...you know her?"

"Yes," Annabeth cut in. "We're good friends. She's the Lieutenant of the Hunters." At this she gave a nod towards Artemis.

"My Thalia...but...she is a tree!"

"No," I said. "Not anymore."

"What...how..." Zeus was speechless.

"It'll come up in the books. For now, let's just keep reading."

**Chapter Two: Three Old Ladies Knit The Socks of Death. **

Athena interrupted, "Not...the fates?" I gave a grim nod, and the mood of the mood seemed to darken.

**I was used to the occasional wierd experience, but usually they were over quickly. This twenty-four/seven hallucination was more than I could handle. For the rest of the school year, the entire campus seemed to be playing some kind of trick on me. The students acted as if they were completely and totally convinced that Mrs. Kerr-a perky blonde woman whom I had never seen in my life until she got on our bus at the end of the field trip-had been our pre-algebra teacher since Christmas. **

**Every so often I would spring a Mrs. Dodds reference on somebody, just to see if I could trip them up, but they would stare at me like I was psycho.**

**It got so I almost believed them-Mrs. Dodds had never existed. **

**Almost.**

**But Grover couldn't fool me. When I mentioned the name Dodds to him, he would hesitate, then claim she didn't exist. But I knew he was lying. **

**Something was going on. Something _had _happened at the museum.**

**I didn't have much time to think about it during the days, but at night, visions of Mrs. Dodds with talons and leathery wings would wake me up in a cold sweat.**

**The freak weather continued, which didn't help my mood. One night, a thunderstorm blew out the windows in my dorm room. A few days later, the biggest tornado ever spotted in the Huson Valley touched down only fifty miles from Yancy Academy. One of the current events we studied in social studies class was the unusual number of small planes that had gone down in sudden squalls in the Atlantic that year. **

**I started feeling cranky and irratable most of the time. My grades slipped form D's to F's. I got into more fights with Nancy Bobofit and her friends. I was sent out into the hallway for almost every class.**

**Finally, when our English teacher, Mr. Nicoll, asked me for the millionth time why I was too lazy to ****study for spelling tests, I snapped. I called him an old sot. I wasn't even sure what it meant, but it ****sounded good.**

**The headmaster sent my mom a letter the following week, making it official: I would not be invited back ****next year to Yancy Academy.**

**Fine, I told myself. Just fine.**

**I was homesick.**

**I wanted to be with my mom in our little apartment on the Upper East Side, even if I had to go to public ****school and put up with my obnoxious stepfather and his stupid poker parties.**

"Step-father?" Poseidon broke in. "Sally, she re-married?"

"Yes." I said. "Although she's got a boyfriend at the moment. My step-father was the most humanesque person on this planet. She married him to cover up my scent."

**And yet... there were things I'd miss at Yancy. The view of the woods out my dorm window, the ****Hudson River in the distance, the smell of pine trees. I'd miss Grover, who'd been a good friend, even if ****he was a little strange. I worried how he'd survive next year without me.**

**I'd miss Latin class, too—Mr. Brunner's crazy tournament ****days and his faith that I could do well. ****As exam week got closer, Latin was the only test I studied ****for. I hadn't forgotten what Mr. Brunner had t****old me about this subject being life-and-death for me. I wasn't sure why, but I'd started to believe him.**

"Believe it, Percy," Apollo said, changing his voice so he sounded like the voice from above. "Believe it..."

**The evening before my final, I got so frustrated I threw the _Cambridge Guide to Greek Mythology _****across my dorm room. Words had started swimming off the page, circling my head, the letters doing ****one-eighties as if they were riding skateboards. There was no way I was going to remember the ****difference between Chiron and Charon, or Polydictes and Polydeuces. And conjugating those Latin ****verbs? Forget it. ****I paced the room, feeling like ants were crawling around inside my shirt. **

**I remembered Mr. Brunner's serious expression, his thousand-year-old eyes. _I will accept only the best from you, Percy Jackson._**

**I took a deep breath. I picked up the mythology book. ****I'd never asked a teacher for help before. Maybe if I talked to Mr. Brunner, he could give me some ****pointers. At least I could apologize for the big fat F I was about to score on his exam. I didn't want to ****leave Yancy Academy with him thinking I hadn't tried. **

**I walked downstairs to the faculty offices. Most of them were dark and empty, but Mr. Brunner's door ****was ajar, light from his window stretching across the hallway floor. **

**I was three steps from the door handle when I heard voices inside the office. Mr. Brunner asked a ****question. A voice that was definitely Grover's said "...worried about Percy, sir."**

**I froze.**

**I'm not usually an eavesdropper, but I dare you to try not listening if you hear your best friend talking ****about you to an adult.**

**I inched closer.**

**"... alone this summer," Grover was saying. "I mean, a Kindly One in the _school! _Now that we know for sure, and _they _know too-"**

**"We would only make matters worse by rushing him," Mr. Brunner said. "We need the boy to mature ****more."**

**"But he may not have time. The summer solstice deadline—"**

**"Will have to be resolved without him, Grover. Let him enjoy his ignorance while he still can."**

**"Sir, he _saw _her..."**

**"His imagination," Mr. Brunner insisted. "The Mist over the students and staff will be enough to convince ****him of that."**

"I think Percy's a little smarter than that," Annabeth said. "Give him a little credit."

**"Sir, I ... I can't fail in my duties again." Grover's voice was choked with emotion. "You know what that ****would mean."**

"Failed?" Dionysus said. "But...I haven't had a satyr fail for years! Not since...oh."

"What?" I asked. "Ohh," I shot a haphazard glance at Zeus. He was still piecing it together, but by the way his face was turning redder and redder, I knew he was close. I figured we had about ten seconds before Grover was just a pile of ashes on the ground. "Dad...let's keep reading!"

**"You haven't failed, Grover," Mr. Brunner said kindly. "I should have seen her for what she was. Now l****et's just worry about keeping Percy alive until next fall—"**

**The mythology book dropped out of my hand and hit the floor with a thud.**

**Mr. Brunner went silent.**

**My heart hammering, I picked up the book and backed down the hall.**

**A shadow slid across the lighted glass of Brunner's office door, the shadow of something much taller ****than my wheelchair-bound teacher, holding something that looked suspiciously like an archer's bow.**

**I opened the nearest door and slipped inside.**

**A few seconds later I heard a slow _clop-clop-clop, _like muffled ****wood blocks, then a sound like an ****animal snuffling right outside my door. A large, dark shape paused in front of the glass, then moved on.**

**A bead of sweat trickled down my neck.**

**Somewhere in the hallway, Mr. Brunner spoke. "Nothing," he murmured. "My nerves haven't been right ****since the winter solstice."**

**"Mine neither," Grover said. "But I could have sworn ..."**

**"Go back to the dorm," Mr. Brunner told him. "You've got a long day of exams tomorrow."**

**"Don't remind me."**

**The lights went out in Mr. Brunner's office.**

**I waited in the dark for what seemed like forever.**

**Finally, I slipped out into the hallway and made my way back up to the dorm.**

**Grover was lying on his bed, studying his Latin exam notes like he'd been there all night.**

**"Hey," he said, bleary-eyed. "You going to be ready for this test?"**

**I didn't answer.**

**"You look awful." He frowned. "Is everything okay?"**

**"Just... tired."**

**I turned so he couldn't read my expression, and started getting ready for bed.**

**I didn't understand what I'd heard downstairs. I wanted to believe I'd imagined the whole thing.**

**But one thing was clear: Grover and Mr. Brunner were talking about me behind my back. They thought I ****was in some kind of danger.**

"Seaweed Brain...they thought you were in danger, because you were in danger!"

"Oh, shut up Wise Girl." Athena narrowed her eyes at me after this exchange.

* * *

**The next afternoon, as I was leaving the three-hour Latin exam, my eyes swimming with all the Greek ****and Roman names I'd misspelled, Mr. Brunner called me back inside.**

**For a moment, I was worried he'd found out about my eavesdropping the night before, but that didn't ****seem to be the problem.**

**"Percy," he said. "Don't be discouraged about leaving Yancy. It's ... it's for the best."**

**His tone was kind, but the words still embarrassed me. Even though he was speaking quietly, the other ****kids finishing the test could hear. Nancy Bobofit smirked at me and made sarcastic little kissing motions ****with her lips.**

**I mumbled, "Okay, sir."**

**"I mean ..." Mr. Brunner wheeled his chair back and forth, like he wasn't sure what to say. "This isn't the ****right place for you. It was only a matter of time."**

**My eyes stung.**

**Here was my favorite teacher, in front of the class, telling me I couldn't handle it. After saying he ****believed in me all year, now he was telling me I was destined to get kicked out.**

**"Right," I said, trembling.**

**"No, no," Mr. Brunner said. "Oh, confound it all. What I'm trying to say ... you're not normal, Percy. That's nothing to be-"**

**"Thanks," I blurted. "Thanks a lot, sir, for reminding me.**

**"Percy—"**

**But I was already gone.**

* * *

**On the last day of the term, I shoved my clothes into my suitcase.**

**The other guys were joking around, talking about their vacation plans. One of them was going on a ****hiking trip to Switzerland. Another was cruising the Caribbean for a month. They were juvenile ****delinquents, like me, but they were _rich _juvenile delinquents. Their daddies were executives, or celebrities.**** I was a nobody, from a family ****of nobodies.**

Annabeth leaned in, "You're not a nobody. And you didn't come from a family of nobodies. Your father was a Greek god. Your mother is the nicest person alive today. Don't ever say something like that again." I will say, that warmed my heart a little. My feelings for Annabeth had been changing recently. She'd always been my best friend, but sh was quicky becoming more.

**They asked me what I'd be doing this summer and I told them I was going back to the city.**

**What I didn't tell them was that I'd have to get a summer ****job walking dogs or selling magazine ****subscriptions, and spend my free time worrying about where I'd go to school in the fall.**

**"Oh," one of the guys said. "That's cool."**

**They went back to their conversation as if I'd never existed.**

**The only person I dreaded saying good-bye to was Grover, but as it turned out, I didn't have to. He'd ****booked a ticket to Manhattan on the same Greyhound as I had, so there we were, together again, ****heading into the city.**

**During the whole bus ride, Grover kept glancing nervously ****down the aisle, watching the other ****passengers. It occurred to me that he'd always acted nervous and fidgety when we left Yancy, as if he ****expected something bad to happen. Before, I'd always assumed he was worried about getting teased. ****But there was nobody to tease him on the Greyhound.**

**Finally I couldn't stand it anymore.**

**I said, "Looking for Kindly Ones?"**

**Grover nearly jumped out of his seat. "Wha—what do you mean?"**

**I confessed about eavesdropping on him and Mr. Brunner the night before the exam.**

**Grover's eye twitched. "How much did you hear?"**

**"Oh...not much. What's the summer solstice deadline?"**

**He winced. "Look, Percy...I was just worried for you, see? I mean, hallucinating about demon math ****teachers..."**

**"Grover—"**

**"And I was telling Mr. Brunner that maybe you were overstressed or something, because there was no ****such person as Mrs. Dodds, and..."**

"Grover," Annabeth said, "I hate to say it, but you're a terrible liar."

Poseidon smiled, then looked to the next sentence, and started laughing. "Aphrodite, you're going to have a ball when you hear this. You know how you said Percy and Annabeth think so similiarly? Listen."

**"Grover, you're a really, really bad liar."**

Aprodite squealed like a cheerleader. "Oh my gods! Percy and Annabeth! You even say the same thing! Percy, when do you meet Annabeth? Is it soon? Please say it's soon." Annabeth and I looked at each other shrugged and I replied.

"It's soon."

**His ears turned pink.**

**From his shirt pocket, he fished out a grubby business card. "Just take this, okay? In case you need me t****his summer.**

**The card was in fancy script, which was murder on my dyslexic eyes, but I finally made out something l****ike:**

**Grover Underwood  
****Keeper  
****Half-Blood Hill  
****Long Island, New York  
****(800)009-0009**

**"What's Half—"**

**"Don't say it aloud!" he yelped. "That's my, um ... summer ****address."**

**My heart sank. Grover had a summer home. I'd never considered that his family might be as rich as the ****others at Yancy.**

**"Okay," I said glumly. "So, like, if I want to come visit your mansion."**

**He nodded. "Or ... or if you need me."**

**"Why would I need you?"**

"Harsh, Percy, harsh..." Hermes said.

**It came out harsher than I meant it to.**

**Grover blushed right down to his Adam's apple. "Look, Percy, the truth is, I—I kind of have to protect ****you."**

**I stared at him.**

**All year long, I'd gotten in fights, keeping bullies away from him. I'd lost sleep worrying that he'd get ****beaten up next year without me. And here he was acting like he was the one who defended _me._**

**"Grover," I said, "what exactly are you protecting me from?"**

**There was a huge grinding noise under our feet. Black smoke poured from the dashboard and the whole ****bus filled with a smell like rotten eggs. The driver cursed and limped the Greyhound over to the side of ****the highway.**

**After a few minutes clanking around in the engine compartment, ****the driver announced that we'd all have ****to get off. Grover and I filed outside with everybody else.**

**We were on a stretch of country road—no place you'd notice if you didn't break down there. On our ****side of the highway was nothing but maple trees and litter from passing ****cars. On the other side, across ****four lanes of asphalt shimmering with afternoon heat, was an old-fashioned fruit stand.**

**The stuff on sale looked really good: heaping boxes of bloodred cherries and apples, walnuts and ****apricots, jugs of cider in a claw-foot tub full of ice. There were no customers, ****just three old ladies sitting i****n rocking chairs in the shade of a maple tree, knitting the biggest pair of socks I'd ever seen.**

**I mean these socks were the size of sweaters, but they were clearly socks. The lady on the right knitted ****one of them. The lady on the left knitted the other. The lady in the middle held an enormous basket of ****electric-blue yarn.**

**All three women looked ancient, with pale faces wrinkled like fruit leather, silver hair tied back in white ****bandannas, bony arms sticking out of bleached cotton dresses.**

"Oh no." Athena said. "The Fates."

**The weirdest thing was, they seemed to be looking right at me.**

**I looked over at Grover to say something about this and saw that the blood had drained from his face. ****His nose was twitching.**

**"Grover?" I said. "Hey, man—"**

**"Tell me they're not looking at you. They are, aren't they?"**

**"Yeah. Weird, huh? You think those socks would fit me?"**

**"Not funny, Percy. Not funny at all."**

**The old lady in the middle took out a huge pair of scissors—gold and silver, long-bladed, like shears. I heard Grover catch his breath.**

Poseidon stopped in his reading. "Percy," he turned to look at me. "Please tell me that Grover had the common sense to get you back on the bus."

"Umm, well..."

**"We're getting on the bus," he told me. "Come on."**

**"What?" I said. "It's a thousand degrees in there."**

**"Come on!" He pried open the door and climbed inside, but I stayed back. **

**Across the road, the old ladies were still watching me. The muddle one cut the yarn, and I swear I could hear the _snip _across four lanes of traffic. **

There was a collective gasp around the room.

**Her two friends balled up the electric-blue socks, leaving me wondering who they could possibly be for-Sasquatch or Godzilla.**

**At the rear of the bus, the driver wrenched a big chunk of smoking metal out of the engine compartment. The bus shuddered, and the engine roared back to life. **

**The passengers cheered. **

**"Darn right!" yelled the driver. He slapped the bus with his hat. "Everybody back on board!"**

**Once we got going, I started feeling feverish, as if I'd caught the flu.**

**Grover didn't look much better. He was shivering and his teeth were chattering.**

**"Grover?"**

**"Yeah?"**

**"What are you not telling me?"**

**He dabbed his forehead with his shirt sleeve. "Percy, what did you see back at the fruit stand?"**

**"You mean the old ladies? What is it about them, man? They're not like ... Mrs. Dodds, are they?"**

**His expression was hard to read, but I got the feeling that the fruit-stand ladies were something much, much worse than Mrs. Dodds. He said, "Just tell me what you saw."**

**"The middle one took out her scissors, and she cut the yarn."**

**He closed his eyes and made a gesture with his fingers that might've been crossing himself, but it wasn't. It was something else, something almost—older.**

**He said, "You saw her snip the cord."**

**"Yeah. So?" But even as I said it, I knew it was a big deal.**

**"This is not happening," Grover mumbled. He started chewing at his thumb. "I don't want this to be like the last time."**

**"What last time?"**

**"Always sixth grade. They never get past sixth."**

**"Grover," I said, because he was really starting to scare me. "What are you talking about?"**

**"Let me walk you home from the bus station. Promise me."**

**This seemed like a strange request to me, but I promised he could.**

**"Is this like a superstition or something?" I asked.**

**No answer.**

**"Grover—that snipping of the yarn. Does that mean somebody is going to die?"**

**He looked at me mournfully, like he was already picking the kind of flowers I'd like best on my coffin.**

"End of the chapter." Poseidon said.

"Well, that was a depressing chapter. Percy flunked out of school, and got destined to die. Great!" Apollo mumbled.

**Thanks so much guys! See ya later! **


	6. Chapter 6

**Merry Christmas everybody! I have finally figured out a way to make this go faster, and I have two or three chapters written in advance now, I just have to type them! Thanks to my reviewers!**

**Disclaimer: I do not own PJO**

* * *

"Alright, somebody else's turn to read. Artemis, why don't you take a chapter."

**Chapter 3: Grover Unexpectedly Loses His Pants.**

At this, Aphrodite's nose wrinkled. "Loses his pants? Ughh..."

**Confession time: I ditched Grover as soon as we got to the bus terminal.**

Everyone's head whipped around to stare at me. "Percy..." Annabeth started. She had that look in her eye that meant I should probably run. "You _ditched _Grover. Your protector. Probably the only reason you're still alive at this point. And you _ditched _him? Percy, it's no wonder you always get into trouble."

**I know, I know. It was rude. But Grover was freaking me out, looking at me like I was a dead man, muttering "Why does this always happen?" and "Why does it always have to he sixth grade?"**

**Whenever he got upset, Grover's bladder acted up, so I wasn't surprised when, as soon as we got off the bus, he made me promise to wait for him, then made a beeline for the restroom. Instead of waiting, I got my suitcase, slipped outside, and caught the first taxi uptown.**

**"East One-hundred-and-fourth and First," I told the driver.**

* * *

**A word about my mother, before you meet her.**

**Her name is Sally Jackson and she's the best person in the world, which just proves my theory that the best people have the rottenest luck. Her own parents diedin a plane crashwhen she was five, and she was raised by an uncle who didn'tcare much about her. She wanted to be a novelist, so she spent high school working to save enough money for a college with a good creative-writing program. Then her uncle got cancer, and she had to quit school her senior year to take care of him. After he died, she was left with no money, no family, and no diploma.**

Poseidon looked down at his feet. "I offered to fix it for her. If she wouldn't have me, I wanted to make sure she would have a good life. But she refused."

Zeus patted him on the shoulder. "Brother, you can't do everything."

**The only good break she ever got was meeting my dad.**

This cheered him up a bit. His eyes brightened, and he seemed to sit a little straighter.

**I don't have any memories of him, just this sort of warm glow, maybe the barest trace of his smile. My mom doesn't like to talk about him because it makes her sad. She has no pictures.**

**See, they weren't married. She told me he was rich and important, and their relationship was a secret. Then one day, he set sail across the Atlantic on some important journey, and he never came back.**

**Lost at sea, my mom told me. Not dead. Lost at sea.**

**She worked odd jobs, took night classes to get her high school diploma, and raised me on her own. She never complained or got mad. Not even once. But I knew I wasn't an easy kid.**

"None of us are, Percy." Annabeth said. "None of us are."

**Finally, she married Gabe Ugliano, who was nice the first thirty seconds we knew him, then showed his true colors as a world-class jerk. When I was young, I nicknamed him Smelly Gabe. I'm sorry, but it's the truth. The guy reeked like moldy garlic pizza wrapped in gym shorts.**

**Between the two of us, we made my mom's life pretty hard. The way Smelly Gabe treated her, the way he and I got along...well, when I came home is a good example.**

* * *

**I walked into our little apartment, hoping my mom would be home from work. Instead, Smelly Gabe was in the living room, playing poker with his buddies. The television blared ESPN. Chips and beer cans were strewn all over the carpet.**

Annabeth shot me a look, and mumbled under her breath, "Your stepfather played poker? Sounds like Mr. D to me..." I grimaced. Annabeth had no clue how much worse Smelly Gabe was, but I had a feeling she was about to find out.

**Hardly looking up, he said around his cigar, "So, you're home."**

**"Where's my mom?"**

**"Working," he said. "You got any cash?"**

**That was it. No ****_Welcome back. Good to see you. How has your life been the last six months._**

**Gabe had put on weight. He looked like a tuskless walrus in thrift-store clothes. He had about three hairs on his head, all combed over his bald scalp, as if that made him handsome or something.**

**He managed the Electronics Mega-Mart in Queens, but he stayed home most of the time. I don't know why he hadn't been fired long before. He just kept on collecting paychecks, spending the money on cigars that made me nauseous, and on beer, of course. Always beer. Whenever I was home, he expected me to provide his gambling funds. He called that our "guy secret." Meaning, if I told my mom, he would punch my lights out.**

"Has he ever..." I didn't look up to see who had asked, I just mumbled a "Yes."

**"I don't have any cash," I told him.**

**He raised a greasy eyebrow.**

**Gabe could sniff out money like a bloodhound, which was surprising, since his own smell should've covered up everything else.**

Grover chuckled. "You don't know how close to the truth that is. His own smell did cover everything else up. Your mother was a smart woman."

Everybody else just stared, uncomprehending, at Grover. I could see when Athena understood. Her eyes are the same as Annabeth's and her eyes lit up the way Annabeth's do.

**"You took a taxi from the bus station," he said. Probably paid with a twenty. Got six, seven bucks in change. Somebody expects to live under this roof, he ought to carry his own weight. Am I right, Eddie?"**

**Eddie, the super of the apartment building, looked at me with a twinge of sympathy. "Come on, Gabe," he said. "The kid just got here."**

**"Am I right?" Gabe repeated.**

**Eddie scowled into his bowl of pretzels. The other two guys passed gas in harmony.**

"Eurghh!" I didn't need to look to see who had let out such a girly squeal. Aphrodite.

**"Fine," I said. I dug a wad of dollars out of my pocket and threw the money on the table. "I hope you lose."**

**"Your report card came, brain boy!" he shouted after me. "I wouldn't act so snooty!"**

**I slammed the door to my room, which really wasn't my room. During school months, it was Gabe's "study." He didn't study anything in there except old car magazines, but he loved shoving my stuff in the closet, leaving his muddy boots on my windowsill, and doing his best to make the place smell like his nasty cologne and cigars and stale beer.**

**I dropped my suitcase on the bed. Home sweet home.**

All this talk about Gabe and my miserable childhood was making me sad. I guess Annabeth could just read me that well, because she leaned over and said, "Cheer up Percy," while she gave me a big hug.

**Gabe's smell was almost worse than the nightmares about Mrs. Dodds, or the sound of that old fruit lady's shears snipping the yarn.**

**But as soon as I thought that, my legs felt weak. I remembered Grover's look of panic—how he'd made me promise I wouldn't go home without him. A sudden chill rolled through me. I felt like someone—something—was looking for me right now, maybe pounding its way up the stairs, growing long, horrible talons.**

**Then I heard my mom's voice. "Percy?"**

**She opened the bedroom door, and my fears melted.**

**My mother can make me feel good just by walking into the room. Her eyes sparkle and change color in the light. Her smile is as warm as a quilt. She's got a few gray streaks mixed in with her long brown hair, but I never think of her as old. When she looks at me, it's like she's seeing all the good things about me, none of the bad. I've never heard her raise her voice or say an unkind word to anyone, not even me or Gabe.**

**"Oh, Percy." She hugged me tight. "I can't believe it. You've grown since Christmas!"**

**Her red-white-and-blue Sweet on America uniform smelled like the best things in the world: chocolate, licorice, and all the other stuff she sold at the candy shop in Grand Central. She'd brought me a huge bag of "free samples," the way she always did when I came home.**

Hermes snorted. "I like this lady. Free samples? Sounds like my daughter."

**We sat together on the edge of the bed. While I attacked the blueberry sour strings, she ran her hand through my hair and demanded to know everything I hadn't put in my letters. She didn't mention anything about my getting expelled. She didn't seem to care about that. But was I okay? Was her little boy doing all right?**

**I told her she was smothering me, and to lay off and all that, but secretly, I was really, really glad to see her.**

"Awww..." Aphrodite cooed, "How sweet is that?"

**From the other room, Gabe yelled, "Hey, Sally—how about some bean dip, huh?"**

**I gritted my teeth.**

**My mom is the nicest lady in the world. She should've been married to a millionaire, not to some jerk like Gabe.**

"I agree" Poseidon said.

**For her sake, I tried to sound upbeat about my last days at Yancy Academy. I told her I wasn't too down about the expulsion. I'd lasted almost the whole year this time. I'd made some new friends. I'd done pretty well in Latin. And honestly, the fights hadn't been as bad as the headmaster said. I liked Yancy Academy. I really did. I put such a good spin on the year, I almost convinced myself. I started choking up, thinking about Grover and Mr. Brunner. Even Nancy Bobofit suddenly didn't seem so bad.**

**Until that trip to the museum...**

**"What?" my mom asked. Her eyes tugged at my conscience, trying to pull out the secrets. "Did something scare you?"**

**"No, Mom."**

**I felt bad lying. I wanted to tell her about Mrs. Dodds and the three old ladies with the yarn, but I thought it would sound stupid.**

**She pursed her lips. She knew I was holding back, but she didn't push me.**

**"I have a surprise for you," she said. "We're going to the beach."**

**My eyes widened. "Montauk?"**

**"Three nights—same cabin."**

**"When?"**

**She smiled. "As soon as I get changed."**

"Montauk..." Poseidon murmered. "That's a great beach..."

**I couldn't believe it. My mom and I hadn't been to Montauk the last two summers, because Gabe said there wasn't enough money.**

**Gabe appeared in the doorway and growled, "Bean dip, Sally? Didn't you hear me?"**

**I wanted to punch him, but I met my mom's eyes and I understood she was offering me a deal: be nice to Gabe for a little while. Just until she was ready to leave for Montauk. Then we would get out of here. "I was on my way, honey," she told Gabe. "We were just talking about the trip."**

**Gabe's eyes got small. "The trip? You mean you were serious about that?"**

**"I knew it," I muttered. "He won't let us go."**

**"Of course he will," my mom said evenly. "Your stepfather is just worried about money. That's all. Besides," she added, "Gabriel won't have to settle for bean dip. I'll make him enough seven-layer dip for the whole weekend. Guacamole. Sour cream. The works."**

"Good job, Sally." Aphrodite said. "The way to win a man's heart is through his stomach. Bribe him with food!"

**Gabe softened a bit. "So this money for your trip ... it comes out of your clothes budget, right?"**

**"Yes, honey," my mother said.**

**"And you won't take my car anywhere but there and back."**

**"We'll be very careful."**

**Gabe scratched his double chin. "Maybe if you hurry with that seven-layer dip...And maybe if the kid apologizes for interrupting my poker game."**

**Maybe if I kick you in your soft spot, I thought. And make you sing soprano for a week.**

**But my mom's eyes warned me not to make him mad.**

**Why did she put up with this guy? I wanted to scream. Why did she care what he thought?**

**"I'm sorry," I muttered. "I'm really sorry I interrupted your incredibly important poker game. Please go back to it right now."**

**Gabe's eyes narrowed. His tiny brain was probably trying to detect sarcasm in my statement.**

**"Yeah, whatever," he decided.**

**He went back to his game.**

**"Thank you, Percy," my mom said. "Once we get to Montauk, we'll talk more about... whatever you've forgotten to tell me, okay?"**

**For a moment, I thought I saw anxiety in her eyes—the same fear I'd seen in Grover during the bus ride—as if my mom too felt an odd chill in the air.**

"She seems incredibly perceptive." Athena said. "Are you sure she's not a demi-god?"

"Very sure," Poseidon said. "But she can see through the Mist."

**But then her smile returned, and I figured I must have been mistaken. She ruffled my hair and went to make Gabe his seven-layer dip.**

* * *

**An hour later we were ready to leave.**

**Gabe took a break from his poker game long enough to watch me lug my mom's bags to the car. He kept griping and groaning about losing her cooking—and more important, his '78 Camaro—for the whole weekend.**

**"Not a scratch on this car, brain boy," he warned me as I loaded the last bag. "Not one little scratch."**

**Like I'd be the one driving. I was twelve. But that didn't matter to Gabe. If a seagull so much as pooped on his paint job, he'd find a way to blame me.**

**Watching him lumber back toward the apartment building, I got so mad I did something I can't explain. As Gabe reached the doorway, I made the hand gesture I'd seen Grover make on the bus, a sort of warding-off-evil gesture, a clawed hand over my heart, then a shoving movement toward Gabe. The screen door slammed shut so hard it whacked him in the butt and sent him flying up the staircase as if he'd been shot from a cannon. Maybe it was just the wind, or some freak accident with the hinges, but I didn't stay long enough to find out.**

**I got in the Camaro and told my mom to step on it.**

* * *

**Our rental cabin was on the south shore, way out at the tip of Long Island. It was a little pastel box with faded curtains, half sunken into the dunes. There was always sand in the sheets and spiders in the cabinets, and most of the time the sea was too cold to swim in.**

"But I love it..." I mumbled.

**I loved the place.**

**We'd been going there since I was a baby. My mom had been going even longer. She never exactly said, but I knew why the beach was special to her. It was the place where she'd met my dad.**

**As we got closer to Montauk, she seemed to grow younger, years of worry and work disappearing from her face. Her eyes turned the color of the sea.**

Poseidon's eyes were far away, staring into nothing, and I knew he was reminiscing. Probably about when he met my mother.

**We got there at sunset, opened all the cabin's windows, and went through our usual cleaning routine. We walked on the beach, fed blue corn chips to the seagulls, and munched on blue jelly beans, blue saltwater taffy, and all the other free samples my mom had brought from work.**

"But why blue food?" Annabeth asked me. "I mean, you've always had a thing for it-you even get blue cherry coke at camp-but why blue?"

"It was my mom's way of being rebellious. Gabe told her there was no such thing as blue food, so she and I go out of our way to eat it. She has a huge bottle of blue food coloring at home. She puts it in everything."

**I guess I should explain the blue food.**

**See, Gabe had once told my mom there was no such thing. They had this fight, which seemed like a really small thing at the time. But ever since, my mom went out of her way to eat blue. She baked blue birthday cakes. She mixed blueberry smoothies. She bought blue-corn tortilla chips and brought home blue candy from the shop. This—along with keeping her maiden name, Jackson, rather than calling herself Mrs. Ugliano—was proof that she wasn't totally suckered by Gabe. She did have a rebellious streak, like me.**

**When it got dark, we made a fire. We roasted hot dogs and marshmallows. Mom told me stories about when she was a kid, back before her parents died in the plane crash. She told me about the books she wanted to write someday, when she had enough money to quit the candy shop.**

"Your mom wants to be an author?" Grover asked. "That's cool. I never knew that..."

**Eventually, I got up the nerve to ask about what was always on my mind whenever we came to Montauk—my father. Mom's eyes went all misty. I figured she would tell me the same things she always did, but I never got tired of hearing them.**

**"He was kind, Percy," she said. "Tall, handsome, and powerful. But gentle, too. You have his black hair, you know, and his green eyes."**

**Mom fished a blue jelly bean out of her candy bag. "I wish he could see you, Percy. He would be so proud."**

**I wondered how she could say that. What was so great about me? A dyslexic, hyperactive boy with a D+ report card, kicked out of school for the sixth time in six years.**

"I think you're great, Percy." Annabeth said. "I know you're great."

**"How old was I?" I asked. "I mean...when he left?"**

**She watched the flames. "He was only with me for one summer, Percy. Right here at this beach. This cabin."**

**"But...he knew me as a baby."**

**"No, honey. He knew I was expecting a baby, but he never saw you. He had to leave before you were born."**

**I tried to square that with the fact that I seemed to remember...something about my father. A warm glow. A smile.**

**I had always assumed he knew me as a baby. My mom had never said it outright, but still, I'd felt it must be true. Now, to be told that he'd never even seen me...**

**I felt angry at my father. Maybe it was stupid, but I resented him for going on that ocean voyage, for not having the guts to marry my mom. He'd left us, and now we were stuck with Smelly Gabe.**

Poseidon looked decidedly uncomfortable now. I almost felt bad for him, but I realized this was probably a wake-up call for most of the gods, and decided to let it go.

**"Are you going to send me away again?" I asked her. "To another boarding school?"**

**She pulled a marshmallow from the fire.**

**"I don't know, honey." Her voice was heavy. "I think ... I think we'll have to do something."**

**"Because you don't want me around?" I regretted the words as soon as they were out.**

**My mom's eyes welled with tears. She took my hand, squeezed it tight. "Oh, Percy, no. I—I _have_ to, honey. For your own good. I have to send you away."**

**Her words reminded me of what Mr. Brunner had said—that it was best for me to leave Yancy.**

**"Because I'm not normal," I said.**

**"You say that as if it's a bad thing, Percy. But you don't realize how important you are. I thought Yancy Academy would be far enough away. I thought you'd finally be safe."**

**"Safe from what?"**

**She met my eyes, and a flood of memories came back to me—all the weird, scary things that had ever happened to me, some of which I'd tried to forget.**

**During third grade, a man in a black trench coat had stalked me on the playground. When the teachers threatened to call the police, he went away growling, but no one believed me when I told them that under his broad-brimmed hat, the man only had one eye, right in the middle of his head.**

Artemis gasped, and cut herself off from reading. "A Cyclops? My Hunters made sure to obliterate them all just a few months ago. Every last one was wither dead or in hiding..."

Annabeth and I shared a glance, They're obviously not in hiding anymore, I thought.

**Before that—a really early memory. I was in preschool, and a teacher accidentally put me down for a nap in a cot that a snake had slithered into. My mom screamed when she came to pick me up and found me playing with a limp, scaly rope I'd somehow managed to strangle to death with my meaty toddler hands.**

Martha and George, the two snakes who wound around Hermes' caduceus, both cringed.

**In every single school, something creepy had happened, something unsafe, and I was forced to move.**

**I knew I should tell my mom about the old ladies at the fruit stand, and Mrs. Dodds at the art museum, about my weird hallucination that I had sliced my math teacher into dust with a sword. But I couldn't make myself tell her. I had a strange feeling the news would end our trip to Montauk, and I didn't want that.**

**"I've tried to keep you as close to me as I could," my mom said. "They told me that was a mistake. But there's only one other option, Percy—the place your father wanted to send you. And I just... I just can't stand to do it."**

**"My father wanted me to go to a special school?"**

**"Not a school," she said softly. "A summer camp."**

**My head was spinning. Why would my dad—who hadn't even stayed around long enough to see me born— talk to my mom about a summer camp? And if it was so important, why hadn't she ever mentioned it before?**

**"I'm sorry, Percy," she said, seeing the look in my eyes. "But I can't talk about it. I—I couldn't send you to that place. It might mean saying good-bye to you for good."**

**"For good? But if it's only a summer camp ..."**

**She turned toward the fire, and I knew from her expression that if I asked her any more questions she would start to cry.**

* * *

**That night I had a vivid dream.**

**It was storming on the beach, and two beautiful animals, a white horse and a golden eagle, were trying to kill each other at the edge of the surf. The eagle swooped down and slashed the horse's muzzle with its huge talons. The horse reared up and kicked at the eagles wings. As they fought, the ground rumbled, and a monstrous voice chuckled somewhere beneath the earth, goading the animals to fight harder.**

**I ran toward them, knowing I had to stop them from killing each other, but I was running in slow motion. I knew I would be too late. I saw the eagle dive down, its beak aimed at the horse's wide eyes, and I screamed, _No!_**

**I woke with a start.**

**Outside, it really was storming, the kind of storm that cracks trees and blows down houses. There was no horse or eagle on the beach, just lightning making false daylight, and twenty-foot waves pounding the dunes like artillery.**

**With the next thunderclap, my mom woke. She sat up, eyes wide, and said, "Hurricane."**

"Hurricane?" Annabeth said. "I may not be a native New Yorker, but I'm pretty sure hurricanes don't happen on Long Island in June."

**I knew that was crazy. Long Island never sees hurricanes this early in the summer. But the ocean seemed to have forgotten. Over the roar of the wind, I heard a distant bellow, an angry, tortured sound that made my hair stand on end.**

**Then a much closer noise, like mallets in the sand. A desperate voice—someone yelling, pounding on our cabin door.**

**My mother sprang out of bed in her nightgown and threw open the lock.**

**Grover stood framed in the doorway against a backdrop of pouring rain. But he wasn't... he wasn't exactly Grover.**

**"Searching all night," he gasped. "What were you thinking?"**

**My mother looked at me in terror—not scared of Grover, but of why he'd come.**

**"Percy," she said, shouting to be heard over the rain. "What happened at school? What didn't you tell me?"**

**I was frozen, looking at Grover. I couldn't understand what I was seeing.**

**"O Zeu kai alloi theoi!"he yelled. "It's right behind me! Didn't you _tell_ her?"**

**I was too shocked to register that he'd just cursed in Ancient Greek, and I'd understood him perfectly. I was too shocked to wonder how Grover had gotten here by himself in the middle of the night. Because Grover didn't have his pants on—and where his legs should be...where his legs should be...**

Grover chuckled. "Focus, Percy...focus."

**My mom looked at me sternly and talked in a tone she'd never used before: "_Percy. _Tell me _now!"_**

**I stammered something about the old ladies at the fruit stand, and Mrs. Dodds, and my mom stared at me, her face deathly pale in the flashes of lightning.**

**She grabbed her purse, tossed me my rain jacket, and said, "Get to the car. Both of you. _Go!"_**

**Grover ran for the Camaro—but he wasn't running, exactly. He was trotting, shaking his shaggy hindquarters, and suddenly his story about a muscular disorder in his legs made sense to me. I understood how he could run so fast and still limp when he walked.**

**Because where his feet should be, there were no feet. There were cloven hooves.**

"Wait a minute..." Suddenly a boatload of questions hit my brain all at once. "What are we going to do when we get back to our own time? Change things? How? And can we bring other people to join us here? There's a few people I want you to meet, and a few I need to talk to."

I leaned over to talk to Annabeth. "I need Chiron here. I'm going to be at Camp Half-Blood in the next chapter and there's some questions Chiron's going to need to answer. And I want Zeus to meet Thalia and Nico."

"Nico?" She replied. "Are you sure that's wise? Hades isn't here."

"He needs to be here. I-" I was cut off by someone clearing their throat. I turned and realized that everybody was watching our litle exchange with great interest. I decided to just spit it out. "Lord Zeus, Annabeth and I would like for some friends to join us here. Is that possible?"

"Well, I suppose, within reason."

I went through a list in my head, then turned to Grover. I motioned for Annabeth to join us. "This is the perfect opportunity to get them to see the wrong in their ways and get them to have contact with their children. Grover, since you know what happens in this chapter, I want you to go to camp and get everybody I need. I need Chiron, and campers from every cabin. We're going to have a little family reunion. Bring as many as you can, but make sure you get Thalia and Nico. You might need to track Nico down first. And...see if you can get Hades."

"Hades!" Both Annabeth and Grover squealed, just loud enough for the gods to hear.

"Yes, Hades. Nico's going to need some protection from Zeus. Thanks, Grover. I knew I could count on you."

"Alright." I announced. "Grover will go and get our friends. We can continue reading in his absence. I threw Grover a wink and he went on his way."

* * *

**Thanks for reading! Review please! I will be on hiatus until New Years! See y'all in 2013!**


	7. Chapter 7

**Sorry for the delay, but I have a special treat for ya'll! Even though this chapter is under 3,000 words, guess what? Our favorite couple might have an aha moment! Anyway, I am seriously sorry about the delay, and I hope ya'll enjoy!**

**Disclaimer: I do not own PJO!**

"Alright then." Zeus said. "Athena, why don't you read."

**Chapter 4: My Mother Teaches Me Bullfighting**

Poseidon paled. "I'm not liking the sounds of that."

**We tore through the night along dark country roads. Wind slammed against the Camaro. Rain lashed the windshield. I didn't know how my mom could see anything, but she kept her foot on the gas.**

**Every time there was a flash of lightning, I looked at Grover sitting next to me in the backseat and I wondered if I'd gone insane, or if he was wearing some kind of shag-carpet pants. But, no, the smell was one I remembered from kindergarten field trips to the petting zoo— lanolin, like from wool. The smell of a wet barnyard animal.**

**All I could think to say was, "So, you and my mom... know each other?"**

**Graver's eyes flitted to the rearview mirror, though there were no cars behind us. "Not exactly," he said. "I mean, we've never met in person. But she knew I was watching you."**

**"Watching me?"**

**"Keeping tabs on you. Making sure you were okay. But I wasn't faking being your friend," he added hastily. "I ****_am _****your friend."**

Annabeth chuckled. "Nice save, Grover."

**"Um...what ****_are _****you exactly?"**

**"That doesn't matter right now."**

**"It doesn't matter? From the waist down, my best friend is a donkey—"**

Dionysus cringed.

**Grover let out a sharp, throaty "****_Blaa-ha-ha!"_**

**I'd heard him make that sound before, but I'd always assumed it was a nervous laugh. Now I realized it was more of an irritated bleat.**

**"Goat!" he cried.**

**"What?"**

**"I'm a ****_goat _****from the waist down."**

**"You just said it didn't matter."**

**"Blaa-ha-ha!There are satyrs who would trample you under hoof for such an insult!"**

**"Whoa. Wait. Satyrs. You mean like...Mr. Brunner's myths?"**

**"Were those old ladies at the fruit stand a ****_myth, _****Percy? Was Mrs. Dodds a myth?"**

**"So you ****_admit _****there was a Mrs. Dodds!"**

"Of course, Percy," Annabeth said. "Geez, how thick can you be?"

**"Of course."**

**"Then why—"**

**"The less you knew, the fewer monsters you'd attract," Grover said, like that should be perfectly obvious. "We put Mist over the humans' eyes. We hoped you'd think the Kindly One was a hallucination. But it was no good. You started to realize who you are."**

**"Who I—wait a minute, what do you mean?"**

**The weird bellowing noise rose up again somewhere behind us, closer than before. Whatever was chasing us was still on our trail.**

**"Percy," my mom said, "there's too much to explain and not enough time. We have to get you to safety."**

**"Safety from what? Who's after me?"**

**"Oh, nobody much," Grover said, obviously still miffed about the donkey comment. "Just the Lord of the Dead and a few of his blood-thirstiest minions."**

Poseidon looked on the edge of hysteria now. Apparently the thought of me and my mother being chased by Hades was enough to freak him out. "Don't worry, Dad," I reassured him. "I survive."

He looked a little better, before asking, "And Sally?"

"Umm, well, she's alive. At the end of the book."

**"Grover!"**

**"Sorry, Mrs. Jackson. Could you drive faster, please?"**

**I tried to wrap my mind around what was happening, but I couldn't do it. I knew this wasn't a dream. I had no imagination. I could never dream up something this weird. My mom made a hard left. We swerved onto a narrower road, racing past darkened farmhouses and wooded hills and PICK YOUR OWN STRAWBERRIES signs on white picket fences.**

**"Where are we going?" I asked.**

**"The summer camp I told you about." My mother's voice was tight; she was trying for my sake not to be scared. "The place your father wanted to send you."**

**"The place you didn't want me to go."**

**"Please, dear," my mother begged. "This is hard enough. Try to understand. You're in danger."**

**"Because some old ladies cut yarn."**

**"Those weren't old ladies," Grover said. "Those were the Fates. Do you know what it means—the fact they appeared in front of you? They only do that when you're about to...when someone's about to die."**

**"Whoa. You said 'you.'"**

**"No I didn't. I said 'someone.'"**

**"You meant 'you.' As in ****_me."_**

**"I meant ****_you, _****like 'someone'. Not you, ****_you."_**

**"Boys!" my mom said.**

**She pulled the wheel hard to the right, and I got a glimpse of a figure she'd swerved to avoid—a dark fluttering shape now lost behind us in the storm.**

"A fury!" Athena gasped. "This is serious. What did you ever do to Hades?" She asked me with sympathy.

I opened my mouth to answer, when Annabeth elbowed me in the side. "It's a rhetorical question Seaweed Brain."

**"What was that?" I asked.**

**"We're almost there," my mother said, ignoring my question. "Another mile. Please. Please. Please."**

**I didn't know where ****_there _****was, but I found myself leaning forward in the car, anticipating, wanting us to arrive.**

**Outside, nothing but rain and darkness—the kind of empty countryside you get way out on the tip of Long Island. I thought about Mrs. Dodds and the moment when she'd changed into the thing with pointed teeth and leathery wings. My limbs went numb from delayed shock. She really ****_hadn't _****been human. She'd meant to kill me. **

"Of course she meant to kill you!" Athena interrupted herself. "What did you think she was trying to do, give you a hug?"

"Of course not!" I demanded. "I just...well...I don't know." I sat back and pouted.

**Then I thought about Mr. Brunner...and the sword he had thrown me. Before I could ask Grover about that, the hair rose on the back of my neck. There was a blinding flash, a jaw-rattling ****_boom!_****, and our car exploded. I remember feeling weightless, like I was being crushed, fried, and hosed down all at the same time. **

"Ahh..." Zeus said. "Sorry in advance, my boy. I assume that was a lightning bolt?"

"Yes." I said. "But, you're not to blame."

"Whatever do you mean, Percy?" Annabeth asked. "Zeus controls the lightning bolts."

I opened my mouth to answer, when I saw all the gods leaning in, hanging on for every word. "Excuse us." I said, then leaned in even closer to Annabeth, and started whispering in her ear. "Zeus isn't controlling the lightning. It's been stolen. So..umm..well...Luke's got it."

Annabeth drooped when I told her Luke had the bolt. I knew that, deep down, she still liked Luke, and wanted him to turn from the evil. After a quick glance at the gods, I grabbed Annabeth's wrist and began pulling her towards the doors to the throne room. "We'll be back..." I said.

We got out of the throne room, and found a little alcove in the corner of the foyer. "Annabeth..." Now that I had her out here, I didn't know how to start. "Look, I'm-I'm really sorry."

"Sorry? Sorry for what Percy? Are you sorry that Luke's not here anymore? That he's gone evil? That he was the closest thing to family I had? That-" Now Annabeth was starting to crack. A few tears leaked out of her eyes and she sank to the floor. "That he broke a promise...that he left...and that he's not coming back...that me and Thalia, and him, it was all a joke. He never meant any of it."

"Annabeth, I'm not sorry for any of that. I'm sorry that you're hurting. I'm sorry that I can't do anything to help. I'm sorry for everything."

"Why do you care?" I recoiled, hurt. "Why do you care, Percy? Everyone I-everyone I love has left me. I don't want you to be at the top of that list."

"Annabeth..." She wouldn't look up. "Annabeth, look at me. I'm not going anywhere, Wise Girl. I'm here to stay. I'm not planning on ever being on that list. I promise. Because, well, I love you. And-" I never got any further. After hearing my confession, Annabeth's head snapped up. She shot up, and pressed her lips to mine. My whole body stiffened up, and then relaxed as the thought process went through my head.

_Annabeth's kissing me...Annabeth's kissing me...oh my Gods...Annabeth's KISSING ME!_

She pulled away, and whispered the four words I'd been waiting to hear for so long. "I love you too."

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, with rumpled clothing and tangled hair, Annabeth and I casually strolled back into the throne room. I knew immediately three of the gods knew what we had been doing. Poseidon had a proud look on his face and shot me a wink, Athena had a murderous look on her face that I knew meant trouble, and Aphrodite looked like she'd just won a million drachmas in the lottery.

"Nice catch, son." My proud father said.

"Annabeth Chase! How could you like that-that sea spawn!" Annabeth was being chewed out by her "oh-so-supportive" mother.

"*Gasp* Percy...Annabeth...You've finally come to your senses." She got up from her chair and squashed us both into a hug. "It's about time. And I've only known you for a few hours! Think of how excited I must be in the books if I've known you two for years!"

Annabeth and I both gave muffled groans. Aphrodite giggled and swept back off to her chair.

"So...Anyway." Athena shot me a look that clearly said I was not forgiven for getting together with her daughter. "Let's get back to rea-" Her face turned a purplish color, while mine was turning various shades of red. Annabeth had decided to scoot her chair over to mine, sit as close to the edge as possible, and then snuggle into my side. All the gods burst out laughing at the look on mine and Athena's face.

"Annabeth..." The goddess was clearly trying to calm herself down-not that it was working. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Getting comfortable." Was the muffled reply. Athena looked about to go on another rampage when another voive cut her off.

"Leave them alone." Everyone turned to see Demeter shifting in her chair awkwardly. "I mean, look at them! How sweet is that?"

Athena seemed to be stuck between the idea of yelling some more, and finding out what happens next. The book won.

**I peeled my forehead off the back of the driver's seat and said, "Ow."**

**"Percy!" my mom shouted.**

**"I'm okay... ."**

**I tried to shake off the daze. I wasn't dead. The car hadn't really exploded. We'd swerved into a ditch. Our driver's-side doors were wedged in the mud. The roof had cracked open like an eggshell and rain was pouring in.**

**Lightning. That was the only explanation. We'd been blasted right off the road. Next to me in the backseat was a big motionless lump. "Grover!"**

**He was slumped over, blood trickling from the side of his mouth. I shook his furry hip, thinking, No! Even if you are half barnyard animal, you're my best friend and I don't want you to die! **

Everyone was on the edge of their seat now. Even Dionysus looked a little interested.

**Then he groaned "Food," and I knew there was hope.**

**"Percy," my mother said, "we have to..." Her voice faltered.**

**I looked back. In a flash of lightning, through the mud-spattered rear windshield, I saw a figure lumbering toward us on the shoulder of the road. The sight of it made my skin crawl. It was a dark silhouette of a huge guy, like a football player. He seemed to be holding a blanket over his head. His top half was bulky and fuzzy. His upraised hands made it look like he had horns. **

"It's not a blanket, you idiot. And the reason it looks like he has horns is because he has horns!" Apparently Athena was now taking out her anger on me by insulting my intelligence in as many ways as possible.

**I swallowed hard. "Who is—"**

**"Percy," my mother said, deadly serious. "Get out of the car."**

**My mother threw herself against the driver's-side door. It was jammed shut in the mud. I tried mine. Stuck too. I looked up desperately at the hole in the roof. It might've been an exit, but the edges were sizzling and smoking.**

**"Climb out the passenger's side!" my mother told me. "Percy—you have to run. Do you see that big tree?"**

**"What?"**

**Another flash of lightning, and through the smoking hole in the roof I saw the tree she meant: a huge, White House Christmas tree-sized pine at the crest of the nearest hill. **

"Good." Poseidon said. "You're within sight of camp."

**"That's the property line," my mom said. "Get over that hill and you'll see a big farmhouse down in the valley. Run and don't look back. Yell for help. Don't stop until you reach the door."**

**"Mom, you're coming too."**

**Her face was pale, her eyes as sad as when she looked at the ocean.**

**"No!" I shouted. "You ****_are _****coming with me. Help me carry Grover."**

**"Food!" Grover moaned, a little louder.**

**The man with the blanket on his head kept coming toward us, making his grunting, snorting noises. As he got closer, I realized he ****_couldn't _****be holding a blanket over his head, because his hands-huge meaty hands—were swinging at his sides. There was no blanket. Meaning the bulky, fuzzy mass that was too big to be his head...was his head. And the points that looked like horns... **

"Are horns." Apollo finished my book-self's thought for me.

Everyone was silent at that. Annabeth squeaked and buried her head in my side. I just sighed. If this was their reaction to the Minotaur, I'm not sure how they were going to survive the rest of the book.

* * *

**Thanks for reading! Please review!**

**~MusicIsHarmony**


	8. Author's Note

Hey, everybody! I've been getting a load of PM's and reviews regarding confusion with my background story for the characters. The past/present stuff, basically repeating the first 3 chapters, etc. So I've decided to take a week or two hiatus, and rework this whole story. I started out with this whole _I'm gonna wait to get Percy and Annabeth together _attitude, and obviously that didn't work. So I'm going to change the age of Percy and Annabeth, the whole past/present thing will have a new twist, and hopefully it will be a completely different (still amazing) story when I'm done. I want to make things clearer for ya'll. I am going to be changing as I go, so feel free to check back here regularly to read the "new" chapters!

Thanks!

~MusicIsHarmony


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